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Why Quick Fixes Aren’t Enough to Create Real Diversity

In recent years, Corporate America has made increasing use of two words: diversity and inclusion. Both internally and in public, businesses have pledged to increase and retain the proportion of women and minorities in their leadership ranks. Still, progress has been slow. Major gaps still persist, notably in tech-driven industries. Part of the reason is that human behavior can be hard to change. For example, nearly three-quarters of executives choose protégés who look just like them, according to a recent survey of 3,200 white-collar workers by the Center for Talent Innovation. What’s becoming clear is that attempts at quick or narrow fixes don’t work. “I think one reason why this has been such a persistent issue is because when companies typically approach it, they treated it like a one-off program where you have a series of trainings and everybody goes back to their workplaces and nobody really pursues things until the next training,” said Phyllis James, the chief diversity and corporate-responsibility officer for MGM Resorts International, who spoke on a panel of experts at the From Day One conference on April 9 in San Francisco, moderated by Katy Steinmetz, San Francisco bureau chief for TIME. More often than not, there’s an urgency among executives to confront the issue, but making real progress calls for “behavior changes that are required every single day from every single leader, so culture becomes the most important thing,” said Michele Nyrop, senior vice president of human resources at Banana Republic and Gap Inc. “The level of accountability required to get that is a long, hard road.” James said she still has to explain to managers why diversity is important, both for business and moral reasons. “I know that we want to think the best of everyone, but everyone does not accept that as a basic premise,” she said. Talking About Systemic Issues Tyler Muse, founder & CEO of Lingo Live, which offers language coaching for multilingual employees, said companies shouldn’t just preach the gospel of D&I, but take time to listen to underrepresented groups talk about political and social issues that may affect them. These topics could include Black Lives Matter, #MeToo or the lack of an adequate pipeline for developing diverse talent. Talking about these larger news stories can create empathy inside the company, Muse said. “If you ignore the bigger picture, if you don’t talk about it as a company, then you’re going to be really limited in fostering that conversation about what diversity and inclusion really look like,” Muse said. “Being open with our data was a big win for us,” said Ernst Using Advanced Sourcing Tools Another technique that companies can use to boost diversity hiring is to use artificial intelligence and other technologies to help, for example in reducing unconscious bias on the part of recruiters. According to Rachel Ernst, vice president of employee success at Reflektive, a people-management company, the single biggest action that increased diversity at her company was using a sourcing tool requiring a certain number of candidates come from underrepresented backgrounds. After starting the practice last year, half of all new hires have been women, she said. Making Inclusion Part of Day-to-day Work Salesforce, the customer-relationship management giant, made equality a core value of the company, said Molly Ford, the company’s director of global equality, who said it’s a “north star” that guides the company when making big decisions. It also helps bring diversity to the daily work lives of Salesforce employees, Ford said. This involves keeping in mind details like having pronoun pins for employees to wear or gender-neutral bathrooms at Salesforce events. But it also involves creating actionable suggestions for employees who want to be an ally to people of diverse backgrounds. If an employee wants to go to a Salesforce-sponsored Diwali Festival, for example, they would need to sign up for training to learn about the cultural significance of wearing a Sari, Ford said. Salesforce also suggests that allies ask people about their journey to equality, listen with empathy, and speak up when they see something wrong, such as harassment or a racist joke. Additionally, managers at Salesforce receive a monthly scorecard with data about hires, attrition and promotions of women and underrepresented minorities. At MGM Resorts, the company’s 80,000 employees participate in an annual diversity-and-inclusion survey that asks questions about daily interactions with colleagues and managers. “It doesn’t matter how many platitudes or slogans companies give lip service to if it’s not really lived in the daily workplace of the organization,” James said. Reflektive, too, uses employee surveys, Ernst said. And it’s important that companies are transparent about the results of those surveys, so employees know their responses are being heard. “Being open with our data was a big win for us,” Ernst said. Similarly, Muse said Lingo Live uses a Slack bot called Allie that sends out questions about inclusion a few times per month. The biggest pattern gleaned from Allie was that employees felt alienated by the fact that there weren’t enough women in leadership. “We got called out for that,” he said. What Didn’t Work Reaching out to diverse employees and asking them for hiring referrals from their professional networks wasn’t successful, said Ford. Salesforce is just too big to follow up effectively with employees who referred someone for an open role. “We honestly felt like we disrespected you a little bit if we tapped your network and then you didn’t feel like it paid off,” Ford said. "The instant you look at a resume, you're biased," said Sloyan Everyone Is Responsible The lack of diversity in some fields, notably tech and finance, is often blamed on the so-called pipeline problem, which holds that companies don’t have enough qualified candidates coming though the educational system and workforce-development programs. Yet to some extent, that’s passing the blame, experts say. Changing recruiting strategy to focus on more geographically diverse areas may help, but companies should also look at employee experience, leadership behavior, and making sure diversity is reflected in marketing materials and product operations, each with their own set of initiatives. “It really has to be treated as a serious business imperative that has all of the complexity and dimensions of other business problems,” James said. “Your D&I team is there to be a catalyst to integrate diversity and inclusion into the core fabric of your culture. They’re not there to do few programs now and then, but achieving meaningful and impactful inclusion is the responsibility of every different part of the organization.” In a presentation following the diversity panel, Tigran Sloyan, CEO of CodeSignal, explained why the hiring process needs to move beyond the resume. CodeSignal produces industry-standard assessments of job applicants so that companies can make data-driven hiring decisions. “The instant you look at a resume, you’re biased. The proxies we use today,” he said, “are getting less reliable all the time.” Rachel Sandler is a freelance journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She covers business, technology, local real-estate development and housing policy. Follow her on Twitter at @rachsandl

rachelsandler | April 16, 2019
Does Your Team Leader Matter More Than Your Corporate Culture?

While most self-respecting corporations tout their corporate culture as an important recruiting tool, a new book makes the case that culture can’t be reliably measured across big organizations. For a new, research-driven book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World, from Harvard Business Review Press, authors Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall asked employees at many different companies to evaluate statements like, “At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me,” and, “Do I have the chance to use my strengths every day?” to evaluate the workers’ experience. The authors found that within most companies, the answers varied greatly from department to department. In an interview with HuffPost, Buckingham, who studies people and performance at the ADP Research, said the celebrated rankings of “best companies to work for” serve a valid purpose, but more attention should be paid to Individual leaders, especially by prospective job seekers. “For an individual employee, it means the most important thing for you is your local team. Find out as much as you can, and whenever you get worried that the team leader you’re joining is somebody that you can’t click with or don’t trust, take that really seriously,” said Buckingham. Top executives at a company, and their vision, are important too, since it’s hard to work for an organization where you don’t respect the leadership. However, “your actual experience of working is the day-to-day people who just keep showing up every day, working next to you and bringing their work and bringing themselves,” Buckingham told Huffpost. “The good news is it’s much easier to control the experience on a team than it is to try to shift an entire aircraft carrier of a company.”

fromdayone | April 15, 2019
Speak up, Employees! Why Companies Need to Foster Feedback

Disagreements inside some of America’s largest tech companies, including Google and Facebook, have made headlines in the past year, bringing up issues of inclusion, social justice and dissatisfaction with workplace culture. But before it gets to that point—and even during times of public turmoil—it’s important for companies to provide an outlet for employees to make themselves heard, according to panelists at the From Day One conference in San Francisco on April 9. What can businesses do to make that happen? Among other things, leaders should show a vulnerable side with employees, said Jack Altman, founder and CEO of Lattice, a people-management company. Leaders should talk about the company’s missteps and solicit employee feedback in earnest, he said. In the long run, it creates a culture where employees aren’t just “screaming into the void” and actually want to contribute their ideas. “I think vulnerability gives employees a sort of slack for the company that leads to forgiveness,” Altman said during the panel, which was titled “How companies can foster bold ideas—and dissenting ones” and was moderated by San Francisco Chronicle tech reporter Melia Russell. While employee-engagement surveys have become commonplace, there’s more that companies can do to encourage employees to speak out. In fact, companies should have multiple ways for people to express their grievances and concerns, said Nancy Vitale, chief human-resources officer at Genentech. Access to Leadership The larger companies get, the more intentional they have to be in creating instances when employees can talk to senior leadership about and bring up issues about the company. Altman said that since his company, Lattice, is housed in one office with less than 100 people, employees naturally interact with senior leadership frequently. In bigger companies, that just isn’t possible. At Genentech, a biotech giant with 14,000 employees in the U.S., groups of about 18 to 20 staffers meet in informal “coffee chats” with top executives, Vitale said. “We create a living-room-style format that’s casual and informal [and] gives people access to senior leadership. No agenda, just Q&A  and dialogue.” Rajeev Singh, CEO of Accolade, a health-care benefits advisory firm, said he has begun implementing listening sessions where employees and management have a conversation about what they each need from one other, instead of just talking at one another. The sessions, Singh said, have often turned into emotional interactions. “That has been a profound change in the way our teams interact, which we would not have thought of prior to opening up some of these listening panels,” he said. Executives listen to every piece of feedback and respond, even if they don’t agree. Singh said. The hope is that by being transparent, even when times are tough or there’s tension, executives will be more credible in the long run. “Sometimes it’s a little sticky, but it’s a good kind of sticky,” he said. Once-a-year performance reviews, Singh said, can't keep up with the pace of business GE Digital, a software division of General Electric Co., has a 30-minute, all-hands meeting every other Thursday. The session has no formal agenda, and employees use a digital tool called Slido to submit questions for executives. Employees can also upvote other people’s questions they want answered. “This is something we started doing six months ago to deal with the fact we didn’t have a lot to share and employees assumed that’s because we were hiding things,” said Heather Whiteman, GE Digital’s head of people strategy, analytics, digital learning and HR. “But it gave us the opportunity to say, ‘Just ask.’ In harder times, there’s something to that, to let them know that every other week we’ll be here. ‘Just ask, we’ll answer.’” A Room of Their Own Before going straight to the top, employee-resource groups (ERGs) can be an avenue for employees to share experiences and ideas about company culture. These groups are typically centered around a shared identity, such as a women’s group or a Latinx group. “I think those play a really important role in terms of connection and communication within the organization,” Vitale said. She added that companies should also think about intersectionality when encouraging these groups, since employees have multiple aspects to their identities. An example would be a group specifically for black women, or for LGBTQ women. The most powerful outcome of Genentech’s ERGs, Vitale said, is that representatives from different groups have started meeting to discuss how to best support and be better allies to each other. Speeding up the Feedback Cycle Increasingly, companies are starting to move away from a once-a-year schedule for performance reviews and goal-setting. It’s just too slow, Singh said, and can prevent employees from knowing how they’re doing, and responding to feedback, in a timely way. “We believe that the old mode of annual coaching plans and annual objectives just doesn’t keep pace with the pace of the business,” Singh said. Shane Metcalf of 15Five, a people-management company Altman said that he’s seeing companies begin to implement reviews two or three times per year. “As we’ve made that shift, it’s been really liberating, it’s been fantastic,” Singh said. “People feel like they’re heard and that they’re getting a really clear sense of where they stand.” Another evaluation tool that can be helpful in some cases is the 360-degree performance appraisal. These reviews get feedback from everyone around an employee, including people who work for them, colleagues and supervisors. While labor-intensive, 360-degree reviews can highlight disparities in how employees seem themselves and how managers see them. At GE Digital, Whiteman said, employees consistently ranked themselves lower than their managers did, a disconnect that can be remedied. “It helps someone get a better view of their own skills. And to flip it around, sometimes a manager has no idea how good someone really is,” Whiteman said. In a keynote presentation right after the panel, Shane Metcalf, co-founder of 15Five, talked about how to build a culture of continuous feedback within a company. In 15Five’s system, employees take 15 minutes a week to answer questions, managers take five minutes to read and comment on responses, and feedback travels up the ladder to through all levels of management. Rachel Sandler is a freelance journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She covers business, technology, local real-estate development and housing policy. Follow her on Twitter at @rachsandl

rachelsandler | April 15, 2019
How a Health-care Giant Reaches Beyond Its Core Mission

Big businesses have big responsibilities to their employees, their investors, and their customers. But do they owe anything to the world that they operate in? Bechara Choucair, M.D., the chief community health officer for Kaiser Permanente, thinks so. Choucair spoke at the From Day One conference in San Francisco this week, offering insight on how and why Kaiser Permanente broadens its responsibility beyond its 12.4 million members to include the communities where they live. With a background as a family physician and former commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Public Health, Choucair now oversees the efforts of the nation’s largest integrated health system to improve the lives of the 65 million people in those communities. In this leadership role, Choucair emphasizes that health does not simply stem from the hospital, but from the home as well. “When you think about what really impacts health, only 10%, maybe 20% of what impacts health happens within the four walls of the medical office building,” Choucair told Adam Rogers, deputy editor at Wired, who interviewed him at the conference. “What impacts health are the social and economic factors and the communities where people live.” Choucair spoke specifically about one major need that KP’s communities are facing: homelessness. The housing crisis is a health crisis, he asserted. Choucair brought a few statistics into the conversation to illustrate how detrimental homelessness is on the human body: life expectancy for those without a home is 20% lower and the homeless spend two to three days longer in a hospital once admitted, compared with the average patient. Kaiser Permanente invested more than $2.8 billion last year to support and respond to community-health needs. Included in that sum was $200 million towards fighting homelessness and building affordable housing in eight states and the District of Columbia, which made headlines as one of the largest public-sector initiatives on homelessness. Bechara Choucair and Adam Rogers at From Day One San “We come to this with a lot of humility and we come to this with a lot of other partners,” Choucair said. “We’re never going to be experts on housing people, but we partner with the right community-based organizations that are experts on housing individuals.” Some of the partnerships Choucair mentioned include Mayors & CEOs for U.S. Housing Investment, a coalition that Kaiser Permanente joined last year. The bipartisan group of more than 20 mayors and business leaders aims to identify key policy goals that need to be implemented with the help of the federal government. Another partnership Kaiser Permanente is involved in is CityHealth, an initiative that offers city leaders innovative solutions to improve living conditions in their cities. Through these partnerships, KP is able to accurately identify community needs and is able to collaborate to find answers. In order to determine what type of social needs communities are facing, whether it’s poverty, homelessness, food insecurity, or a combination of them all, Choucair said that Kaiser Permanente does extensive research across the U.S. “We conduct community-health needs assessments and we do those on a regular basis where we have a fairly robust, systematic approach to looking at data in each one of our communities, doing interviews with ... key leaders in the community and looking at our own data,” Choucair said. After issues are identified and community-benefit expenditures are made, Kaiser Permanente follows up to determine if its efforts are truly impacting communities and invoking change. Choucair said he tracks KP’s community-benefit expenditures monthly, even weekly. One seemingly larger-than-life goal that Choucair said Kaiser Permanente continues to push for is universal health coverage. “For us, it’s been very clear that it’s about expanding coverage and getting that coverage to be more affordable and making sure that the whole care is high quality,” Choucair said. “That’s really been our focus all along.” Discussion of universal health care has been on the agenda of several Democratic presidential candidates, some of whom have called for “Medicare for all.” For Choucair, the way to get closer to universal health care is to build upon the Affordable Care Act. While it has been under political attack, its proponents make the case that it’s working. Choucair’s personal goal within Kaiser Permanente boils down to continuing what the organization already doing—investing in communities—but in bigger and better ways, he said. Julie Madsen studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and works as a freelance journalist and a beat reporter for the Daily Californian, where she covers higher education and breaking news. Follow her on Twitter

juliemadsen | April 11, 2019
Help Wanted: a New Chief to Restore Wells Fargo’s Reputation

In the aftermath of the financial crisis a decade ago, Wells Fargo was one of the few major banks to emerge untarnished. But the gleaming reputation didn’t last. A few years later a parade of scandals emerged, starting with the discovery that thousands of bank employees had created 2 million fake deposit accounts and credit cards in the names of its customers in a systemic scheme to boost revenues. The San Francisco-based company paid $185 million in fines and promised to curb the kind of sales goals that inspired the fraudulent behavior. The scandal seemed like a rare misstep by a storied institution. Yet examples of abusive treatment of customers just kept on emerging and making headlines.  Yahoo Finance even created a timeline of what Wells had been accused of doing: repossessing the cars of military service members, firing a whistleblower, overcharging small-business operators, discriminating against black and Latino borrowers, and several more allegations. Late last month, CEO Timothy Sloan, a 31-year employee of Wells Fargo, abruptly stepped down in the face of increasing scrutiny of the banking company by Washington regulators and elected officials. He was the second CEO to depart in the midst of the scandals, after John Stumpf, another Wells veteran. Now the company says it’s looking outside its corporate culture for its next leader. In case there was any doubt of the need for an outsider to take the reins, Wells Fargo’s largest investor, Warren Buffett, drove the point home in an interview this week with the Financial Times. “They just have to come from someplace [outside Wells] and they shouldn’t come from Wall Street,” said Buffett, who owns 10% of the company, worth about $22 billion. “They probably shouldn’t come from JPMorgan or Goldman Sachs.” Hiring a leader from one of the big Manhattan-based banks would be sure “to draw the ire of a significant percentage of the Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, and that’s just not smart,” he said. Buffett added that he believes Wells Fargo is still in a strong competitive position, and that consumers have generally stuck with the bank, despite the scandals. “One household out of every three does business with Wells one way or another,” he said.  

fromdayone | April 09, 2019
As One of the First Women CEOs, This Serial Exec Has Experienced It All

Welcome to She Leads, a series digging into the good, the bad, and the ugly of being a woman in business. In each piece, we’ll chat with a different founder about her experiences, the issues women face in business, and how they’re powering through in the face of adversity. Gwen Manto has spent most of her career as not just the only woman at the table, but the only woman employed across the top four levels of management. When she first walked into a boardroom, she did so in a skirt-suit and pantyhose — pants were still a non-option for women (which, again, was really just her). Years later in another boardroom (still all men), she went into labor and stayed in the meeting for the remaining hour and a half through sweat and labor pains. “So it was…I would say it was a choice. It wasn’t forced on me,” she told From Day One. “I could have gotten up probably at any time. People were very accommodating to me when I was pregnant — I think, of course, because it was a novelty.” All this and then some went down during her long string of executive roles at some of America’s most popular retailers. After serving as VP and SVP of Macy’s and Toys ‘R’ Us, respectively, Manto became CEO of Kids Footlocker, and with it, one of the first women to hold the title at a major cooperation. From there she went on to hold EVP and CMO positions at Sear’s, Stein Mart, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and Sports Authority. After 45 years in retail, Manto’s business history can best be encapsulated by her favorite drink – the Cosmopolitan, a working woman’s cocktail of liberation and independence. The drink is one of the top offerings of her company mixallogy, which sells organic cocktail mixers made from "ugly fruit" to reduce waste. For the first time, she’s not just an executive, but a founder too. We chatted with Manto to learn more about being a glass ceiling-breaker and how she’s bringing her experiences into her founder role: Gwen Manto has helped run some of the biggest retailers in the country. Now she has a brand new role: founder. When you became CEO of Kids Footlocker in 1998, women executives were a true rarity — practically non-existent (even today, women account for only 4.8% of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies). In that role and your subsequent executive positions, I’m sure you were the only woman in the room more often than not. What was that like for you? Not only was it 1998 and women weren’t executives, but I was also in an exclusively male-dominated field. It was originally challenging because I would go through entire days without contact with any other women. My peers were male, the people that worked for me were male, and all of our suppliers — Nike, Adidas — were all male. It was interesting to build relationships as a woman in this scenario because you were different, and obviously people treated you differently. I felt the need to fit in and be one of the guys. Even though I wasn’t really interested, I’d watch all the games and read Sports Illustrated cover to cover so I could stand my ground with them. This went on until our CEO at the time, my mentor, took me aside one day and said, “It’s great that you probably know more than they know about what happened in yesterday’s game, but the fact is it’s not really authentic for you. You’re here for a reason — because of your business acumen.” It was really a moment of realization for me, and it kind of released me from feeling like the foreign person in the room. So from then on, I stayed authentic to myself, and I think authenticity allowed me to build relationships, stay in the industry, and go on to similar roles. I’m glad you had someone looking out for you who stepped in to say “you don’t have to do this,” because it sounds like you felt pressured to fit in socially. And do you feel like you had to work harder to prove yourself, too? Were you held to a different standard by your male peers? I believe I was held to a male standard. When you ask, ‘Was it a higher standard?’ I think it was just a different standard. A great example is when I got to Dick’s, I was really looking to build relationships with our executive team and suggested having dinner with one of them. He said to me, ‘well I don’t think my wife would like that.’ And I really almost had to smile because I didn’t have any eyes on him or anything, but I think his wife would be sitting at home thinking ‘why would he go out with that new woman executive?’ You’re not typically invited to golf on Saturday with the guys because in most country clubs, women can’t tee off until 3 in the afternoon. These are givens, but there are other ways to build business relationships — by being a good partner in the business. I learned that through time. What’s a memorable experience you had in business that would only happen to a women? I can think of an example of something I did that a guy would never do. When I was CEO of Kids Footlocker, it was my dream job. For the first time, I could run the whole company, and I had a vision. But I worked in Manhattan, lived in New Jersey, and had three kids including a baby and a special needs child at home. I said I can’t go to work at 5:30 in the morning, get on the train and come back at 7 at night. I decided to find another job back down south where I could live closer to work and have a better balance. When I resigned they said, ‘Well, you know, there are no women here. We’ve given you the chance to do this job and blah blah blah. I don’t want to say you’re the token woman but you’re the only one and why would you do that?’ I think they were totally mystified why I would step off the track. Because at that point I think they considered me one of the guys, and I wasn’t acting like one of the guys. It’s not a typical thing a man would do. Typically they would get support from whoever was at home, so this was was hard for them to understand. I was worried this was going to derail me, but in the end it didn’t, and it gave me the confidence to move to the next thing. After 40 years in retail — specifically the male-dominated world of sports — Manto is ready for a new challenge. So- And as an aside, I did actually go into labor during a board meeting. Oh really? I sat there for an hour and a half in labor. And then I gave birth six hours later. So yeah, I think most guys haven’t done that either. Why didn’t you say anything or excuse yourself from the meeting? Do you think you would have if it were a different work environment — one with more women? Immediately upon seeing me perspiring, I suspect that if it had been a group of women, they would have said, ‘do you want a glass of water? Are you okay?’ At the time, everybody was in the moment, managing the business. And for me, I wanted to be there. So it was…I would say it was a choice. It wasn’t forced on me. I could have gotten up probably at any time. People were very accommodating to me when I was pregnant — I think, of course, because it was a novelty. Because there weren’t many women in business in general and I was 40 having a baby. So it was quite a thing. I think I was looked upon as ‘Wow, that’s a woman and she’s pregnant!’ And remember in those days, we didn’t even wear pants to work. We wore skirt-suits and pantyhose. How have your experiences as an executive and a woman in a male-dominated field influenced your approach to running your new company? When you start a company, it takes 100 percent of your business acumen to make it work. Being an entrepreneur calls upon all of my experience, all of my sense of people, all of my commitment, every day. I mean literally — whatever your experience is, you bring it there when you start a business. As a woman, I think I had a further advantage because we juggle a lot of different things that have different priorities. For me, I’m a female entrepreneur, but I’m also a female entrepreneur who’s 64. I started this business 18 months ago when many people would be retiring. When I walk into a room to raise money, they’re looking at me saying ‘she’s not even the typical female entrepreneur.’ There are positives (‘She has a lot of experience. She’s run a lot of big businesses’) and negatives (‘Hmm, how long is her runway?’) I’ve had a wonderful retail career of over 40 years and have created a lot of businesses. But nothing has been as rewarding as this because it addresses a need, and when I’m not solving problems, we’re just making people happy. Have a cocktail, shake it up. It’s fun. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Sage Lazzaro is a NYC-based journalist covering diversity, inclusion, and social justice across tech, business, and politics. Her work has appeared in Refinery29, VICE, Medium, The New York Observer, and more. Follow her on Twitter here.  

sagelazzaro | April 08, 2019
How to Boost Employee Morale? Give Them a Helping of Public Praise

A few years ago, the Walt Disney Co. launched a Twitter hashtag, #CastCompliment, for the express purpose of promoting the good work their employees do. The millions of visitors to Disney parks are encouraged to tweet about their positive experiences with performers who embody the company’s movie and TV characters across the grounds. “The employee’s supervisor retweets the compliment, along with a picture of the employee,” according to Inc.com. Bruce Jones, a senior programming director at Disney who blogged about the program, called it “an opportunity to create some magic with the positive tweets.” That kind of recognition—praise for good work that fellow employees and even the public can see—may be a surprisingly effective way to help address a disturbing trend in business today. Though unemployment in the U.S. is at about its lowest point in 50 years, worker satisfaction remains alarmingly low. Gallup, the polling organization, "reminds us every couple of years that nearly 70% of employees are actively disengaged” at work, reported Forbes. The Conference Board, a business think tank, found that only 51% of American workers report overall satisfaction with their job, according to its recent poll. Companies have strong business reasons for keeping employees happy, since it reduces employee turnover and boosts productivity. Many factors play into worker satisfaction, including compensation and benefits, but "the No. 1 factor in job satisfaction is not the amount of pay but whether or not the individual feels appreciated and valued for the work they do," wrote psychologists Gary Chapman and Paul White in The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace. Recognition can be a big part of showing appreciation, according to a study in the Harvard Business Review. Among the 512 U.S. employees surveyed who said their company has strong recognition practices, 87% reported feeling “a strong relationship with their direct manager.” That number tumbles to 51% out of those workers who reported “a lack of such practices at their companies.” “Recognition’s frequency also plays a role,” the report continued. “For those who say they receive some form of appreciation more than once a month, 82% describe a strong bond with their bosses. When that occurrence drops to less than once a month, only 63% feel those strong ties.” The study also found that public recognition in the workplace not only has “a powerful effect on those being called out, it also has a significant impact on peers who see great work being rewarded.” If idea of public praise has proven merit, then what methods are best? The execution needs to be tailored to the organization and the worker. It can range in style from ostentatious to subtle—and even silly. Red Velvet Events, an Austin-based company, awards a small plastic troll doll, reports Entrepreneur. During weekly staff meetings, a Red Velvet team member hands over the doll “to another employee and describes the recipient’s work efforts during the previous week. Each person who receives the doll gives it another accessory (earrings, a tattoo, a bow tie, etc.) and presents it to another team member the following week.” The “quirky tradition” reflects the company’s “fun-loving culture” and “ensures employees are consistently being recognized for their hard work by the people who see it first hand: their team.” Joseph Friedman (CDO), Harley Courts (CEO) & Moiz Malik (COO) of Nooklyn , a Brooklyn-based real-estate firm focusing on apartment rentals. (Photo by Chris Setter) The team at Nooklyn, a Brooklyn-based real-estate firm focusing on apartment rentals, collectively participates in employee recognition on its digital platform. Because all the company's stakeholders are plugged in to the platform—the agents, the accountants, the legal team—they all can see how a potential closing is progressing. Harley Courts, Nooklyn’s cofounder and CEO, says the company has incentivized teamwork by increasing commissions for members of a group who collaborate in getting a deal done. Those efforts can be seen by all. (Courts, a lifelong skateboarder, says he wanted to generate the sense of community typically found in that world, in contrast to the often individualistic nature of the real-estate trade.) When a closing is on the books at Nooklyn, it sparks a gif- and emoji-fueled celebration on the company’s Slack feed, with employees customizing the artwork to reflect certain details of the deal, including its players. “Everyone cheers everyone on,” Courts says of the time when a closing at Nooklyn is finalized. “Everyone is psyched. … It’s so embedded in our culture that when you join, you’re like, ‘Wow, I really just went to Mars; this completely is not normal,’ especially people who come from the real-estate industry.” Yet in giving shout-outs, managers need to be sensitive to the personalities of the recipients. Management consultant Ted Boyce says worker recognition in general is a good way for executives to get engagement out of its team members, but not everyone welcomes it. “There are some people who just don’t like that kind of attention, so something that is intended as a positive becomes a negative,” Boyce says. “They get a little embarrassed.” At the same time, he cautions against a phenomenon he calls the “Awards-Show Syndrome,” where “those that feel that they are worthy of recognition feel left out,” he said. “So you may be recognizing one person at the expense of others who are feeling … undervalued,” Boyce observes. It takes a certain level of knowhow to carry out employee recognition successfully, he added. “What I worry about is you’ve got folks who may not have expertise in human behavior that may be going about it the wrong way.” (Photo courtesy of Nooklyn) The right way to do it, said Joe Robinson, a noted work-life balance trainer and speaker, is to personalize the praise, offering "not just off-the-shelf ‘Way to go!’ Or ‘Great job!,’” he wrote in an email. “The key is recognition that goes to the competence, a core psychological need, of the employee.” A better way is something along the lines of “I like the way you did that job.” Such a framing “speaks to the talent and effectiveness of an employee,” Robinson said, “and that lasts, unlike the generic ‘nice work’ kind of recognition.” The leaders at Geocaching HQ, a Seattle-based company that produces a GPS-powered, outdoor treasure-hunting game, are certainly mindful about how they recognize employees. Their managers are encouraged to ask employees how they would most like to be recognized as part of a questionnaire called a “fire starter.” The fire starter is filled out during periodic reviews to generate expectations and “set the manager and employee up for direct success,” according to Eileen Kim, a human-resources manager at Geocaching. Other fire starter questions, according to Kim, include “What do you feel passionate about developing this year?” and “What do we need to ramp up in your role?” The collected data about how their workers might want to be recognized has led to what Kim describes as “a public kudos system” where employees can write “Beyond the Everyday” nomination notecards for peers of their choice. “These notes are posted publicly throughout the month in our community kitchen,” Kim says, “and during our monthly company meetings, three cards are randomly selected. They are each read aloud, and the nominee and nominator get a coffee gift card to spend together.” The methods of employee recognition at Geocaching HQ don’t stop there, and aren’t limited to direct responses to a job well done either. When Kim recently lost her dog, the company’s pet-bereavement policy allowed her to take a week off from work. When she returned to the office, she says, her desk was covered with cards, flowers and cakes. “My CEO actually planted a tree in my dog’s honor,” Kim says, and recounts that another employee started a GoFundMe campaign in Kim’s dog’s name to raise funds for a senior-dog rescue house. The coworker raised more than $400. “How do you encapsulate that feeling?” Kim says, her emotions palpable in her voice. “The whole team just rallied and swarmed [around me] to make me feel supported.” Kim says that experience contributed to her feeling more like she was part of a family, as opposed to any old corporation. Employee experiences like Kim’s may be one of the reasons Geocaching HQ has been recognized each of the last eight years by Outside magazine as one of the best places to work in the U.S. They seem to be doing something right. Michael Stahl is a freelance writer and editor. A former high school English teacher, he has written for Rolling Stone, Vice, The Village Voice, Narratively, Splitsider, Outside and other publications.

Michael Stahl | March 26, 2019
This Founder Insists You Take Time Off After Having a Baby (Even Though She Didn’t)

Welcome to She Leads, a series digging into the good, the bad, and the ugly of being a woman in business. In each piece, we’ll chat with a different founder about her experiences, the issues women face in business, and how they’re powering through in the face of adversity. Though vitamin company Ritual is all about women’s self-care, founder and CEO Katerina Schneider now admits she neglected her own during one of the most important times of her life, right after giving birth, in favor of the business. “I went back to work because we had some important launches coming up, but I actually wish I hadn’t,” she told From Day One. Schneider’s decision at the time was heavily driven by the business culture around her. In the male-dominated worlds of tech and venture capital, the pressure is on and the tolerance for family planning is low to none. In fact, most of the hurdles she has faced while building her company have been around her pregnancy, from a VC blatantly discriminating against her to a demeaning experience at one of the industry’s most renowned conferences. But despite all of this, Schneider has powered through and has learned from her negative experiences how to better the lives of her own employees and the landscape around business and family planning. At Ritual, which she founded in 2015, employees enjoy pregnancy accommodations that go far beyond what companies usually offer. We chatted with Schneider to learn more about starting a family while in business. Excerpts: You raised $40.5 million to date. The vast majority of VCs are men, so as a woman pitching a female-targeted company while also being pregnant, I’m sure that was no walk in the park. What was that experience like for you? Ritual offers a monthly subscription service, so you can get your daily nutrients delivered right to your door I was four months pregnant when we raised our first round, so my journey was a little bit different than than most. It was both kind of empowering and disempowering at the same time. The empowering part was that I quickly raised $1.3 million from really incredible VCs. With them, I was able to be really direct that I was pregnant from the initial conversation. It didn’t matter to them; they just believed in the vision. But in one not-so-empowering conversation, the male VC paused and said, "You know, you have two choices. You can either start a company or you can have a family, but you can’t do both." And that was not so fun. That was disheartening. But it actually served as a catalyst for me to really take someone’s "no," get more aggressive, and propel forward. A lot of women founders I’ve talked to say they have better experiences pitching and connecting with women investors. You’ve also partnered with a lot of women, so I was wondering if this has been your experience? Yes and no, because I did feel that from the men who backed me as well. Brian Singerman from Founders Fund gave us our first check, and he’s definitely not a female. In my seed and also angel rounds, it was a good mix of both male and female investors. Today, our board is 75% women. I think the industry is really changing in terms of female VCs and the attitudes and everything, and I think I was part of that early, early wave. I got to see that, which is really inspiring. Schneider (left of center) with some of her colleagues from Ritual That’s great—I love to see that happening. The last time we chatted was following TechCrunch Disrupt New York in 2016, where you were a finalist in the pitch competition but weren’t treated well as a new mom. The organizers wouldn’t provide a decent place for you to pump and ultimately stuck you on top of a broken escalator. A lot of time has passed and your company is flourishing, so how would you reflect on that experience today? We’ve had employees who’ve had kids since then, and I’ve made it a really big part of my job and vision to create a work environment that is conducive to having families. We had a pump room in our office even when we were smaller, which is very important to me. We have really good paid maternity and paternity leave for our size, offering three months paid and one month unpaid with fully covered health benefits throughout. And now that we’re closer to 50 people, we’re reevaluating this policy to see what else we can offer. (Editor’s note: California mandates six weeks of paid leave for new parents). And we even have babies in the office at times. Going through that really helped me realize the importance of that for employers, and I don’t know if I would’ve felt it as much had I not personally gone through it. (Twice now actually now; I’ve had two kids since launching Ritual). It changes your lens on what companies should offer their employees, what maternity leave should look like, and what people are actually going through during those times. Additionally, we recently launched a prenatal vitamin, and this has influenced the marketing, messaging, and sensitivities around it. Most companies in our space are run by men, and it’s different when you’re really building a company and product for yourself and around experiences you already had. I’m so dedicated to creating the best possible product and the best ingredients but also the messaging and everything around it. What advice would you give to other women founders, especially those navigating starting a family? Ritual touts its "no-nausea capsule design," which is intended to be gentle on an empty stomach with a delayed release formula I encourage my team members to take time off after giving birth. We have good policies, but I personally as the CEO and founder have taken no time off. I went back to work after a week of having my second child and, in hindsight, I kind of regret it to be quite honest. I want women who have companies and families to take time with their new babies and bond, because you’re kind of in it for the long haul when it comes to your company. I think it’s important. Also, I want them to know that you can do it all. I guess I’m a good example of that: we’ve raised over $40 million, I have a growing company, and I’m obsessed with my family, both my kids and my husband. It’s not easy and it takes work, but we women are capable of it all if that’s what we want. What made you come to regret going back to work so soon after giving birth? You know, I’ll never have the first couple weeks of giving birth back. I’ll never have that moment again. It’s something I thought I could prioritize the company over, but the company is still here and it will always be. I totally trust my team, and with a couple of weeks or even a month away, everything would’ve been fine. I’ve realized this as we scale, and I’ve grown to understand that self-care is important. So while I missed that, I now prioritize self-care in other ways and work out almost every single day even if it means taking time away from my kids and the company. You’re in it for the long haul. It’s not like some short stint.   This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Sage Lazzaro is a NYC-based journalist covering diversity, inclusion, and social justice across tech, business, and politics. Her work has appeared in Refinery29, VICE, Medium, The New York Observer, and more. Follow her on Twitter here.

sagelazzaro | March 21, 2019
Crisis Management: How Should Boeing Have Responded to the 737 Crashes?

Someday, Boeing's handling of the trouble with its 737 Max airliner will be a case study in crisis management. It's too early to tell exactly what happened in two crashes of the same plane model within five months— the investigations could go on for months or years—but Boeing's initial resistance to grounding the 737 Max has sparked criticism. In a phone call with President Trump, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg urged Trump to keep the planes in the sky, even as countries around the world were grounding them. The President decided the next day to follow suit, but should the plane's manufacturer have shown more leadership in the crisis? "We could have avoided much of the turmoil had the company’s leaders done a better job of framing the situation," wrote Sandra J. Sucher, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, in the Harvard Business Review.  "Leaders have one crucial task at the start of a disaster in the making, and that is to use the art of framing to describe the nature of the problem the organization is facing. Frames shape the way we think about problems (and also opportunities). They tell us what category of problem we are dealing with, and because they identify a type of problem, they also contain the seeds of action and response." Other management experts tended to agree. Rupert Younger, director of the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation, told the Financial Times that Boeing should have acted faster. “Irrespective of whether it’s their fault, in cases like this it’s almost always the case that organizations that immediately show humanity and empathy and put safety first perform better than those that don’t,” said Younger. In her piece in the Harvard Business Review, Sucher compared Boeing's initial reaction to Johnson & Johnson's response during the Tylenol poisoning crisis in 1982, which is widely regarded as the gold standard for how to handle a corporate crisis. Johnson & Johnson’s CEO at the time, James E. Burke, "famously declared that it was a public health problem," she wrote. The company's framing led to its swift and decisive response, which included a recall of all bottles of Tylenol capsules, the design of tamper-resistant packaging, and eventually the end of capsules that could be pulled apart and resealed. Rather than respond with defensiveness or denial, Johnson & Johnson set an example for the industry, and corporations in general. Properly framing a crisis, Sucher writes, requires hard thinking about what kind of problem the company faces. In the case of Boeing, Sucher argues, a better response might have been: "This is a technical problem that we do not fully understand. In light of that uncertainty, we recommend grounding the 737 Max 8s and 9s until we can be sure we know what is causing these crashes, and can satisfy ourselves and all of the global regulators that the plane is safe to fly again." While Sucher focused on crisis management, other case studies of the 737 may explore Boeing's long-term decisions about the plane. Specifically, was it wise for Boeing to keep modifying a 50-year-old aircraft design rather than starting from scratch, given the dramatic changes in technology over the decades? In a close look at the plane's history in the Los Angeles Times, veteran reporter Ralph Vartabedian traces the plane's low-slung design to the days when passengers had to climb stairs to board the planes and baggage handlers needed direct access to the cargo bays. "That low-to-the-ground design was a plus in 1968, but it has proved to be a constraint that engineers modernizing the 737 have had to work around ever since," Vartabedian writes. "The compromises required to push forward a more fuel-efficient version of the plane—with larger engines and altered aerodynamics—led to the complex flight control software system that is now under investigation." Boeing's motivation for continued modification of the 737 was at least partly about cost-saving, since it's cheaper and simpler to build a derivative plane than a whole new one. Over the years, the 737 has been a best-selling airliner, but now Boeing faces a turning point. With back orders for more than 4,700 of the updated 737 line, Boeing's next moves have much at stake.  

fromdayone | March 15, 2019
Getting to Diversity: It Takes Data, Persistence, and a Willingness to Talk About It

Virtually all the leaders of Corporate America will tell you that diversity is an important goal. But that doesn't mean it's easy to talk about. “If you ever want a meeting to end early in your organization, bring up diversity. Everybody’s done,” quipped Tyronne Stoudemire, vice president of global diversity and inclusion for the Hyatt Corp. Bringing up the topic can be like "touching the third rail," he said, because it's so sensitive. But he added that it needs to be part of the conversation all throughout companies, not just in the human-resources department. “This is not work for the weary, this is not work for the meek. This is for the strong of heart and those who are going to fight for the end, to close the gap,” said Stoudemire, speaking last week on a panel on "Innovation in Inclusive Hiring" at the From Day One conference in Chicago. Underscoring the point, moderator Zoraida Sambolin, an anchor and reporter at Chicago's NBC 5 News, cited a new survey of chief diversity officers in which they said that they still don't get the power and respect they need in order to succeed in their mission. “It isn’t just the title or the role, you’re talking about influence," said Chad Nico Hiu, national director of diversity and inclusion for the YMCA. "Throwing someone in a room and saying, ‘Oh, you’re the chief diversity officer, go be a chief and be diverse,' it just doesn’t work that way.” Change has to come from procedural and structural innovations, which means that diversity has to be part of almost every conversation about a company or organization's future, the panelists asserted. “If it’s going to be something that you’re going to tackle, it can’t just be the conversation about how we get to be more diverse. It literally has to pervade everything that you’re doing,” said Sayar Lonial, executive director of marketing and communications at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Zoraida Sambolin, left, an anchor and reporter at NBC, moderated the discussion NYU Tandon's incoming class was 43% female this year, about twice the percentage of typical engineering schools, thanks to energetic recruiting and efforts to make young women feel welcome on campus. For both businesses and schools, the diversity effort can start when future students or workers are young. “We need to focus on breaking down all the barriers, and there’s certainly large barriers among African-American and Latino communities in engineering,” Lonial said. “If they don’t have the skill set, we want to create K-12 STEM programs so they can make the decision to go into STEM, as opposed to having that decision made for them by a public-school system that doesn’t support it.” Rather than take a subjective approach to diversity, companies can use technology to measure, implement and scale up. “Think of tech as simply a system that helps you say like, ‘OK, what are the data, what does that say my organization should do, how does that put a process in place?” said Lauren Ryan, vice president of new products at Greenhouse Software, which makes talent-acquisition software. Ryan added that, while analyzing data to identify hiring gaps is a good strategy for C-suite executives, those on the lower rungs of the corporate ladder shouldn’t wait for a CEO to take up the cause. Hiring managers should build a diverse pipeline by seeking out applicants with unique perspectives, even if their inboxes are already flooded with resumes, she said. “Then you can kind of prove that it works and start to get buy-in for building something more holistic,” Ryan said. Hyatt launched a program about three years ago called “Project Workforce 2025,” an initiative that outlines how the hotel chain will reach gender parity in terms of hires, promotions and exits over the next six years, Stoudemire said. The company championed the program after analyzing employee data and realizing that, while Hyatt was hiring women of color at a much faster rate than white men, those women were also leaving the company sooner. The problem? A lack of promotions among women of color. In an assessment of organizations in general, Hiu pointed out that hierarchical groups can be exclusionary merely by their structure. “The structure that starts at the top has systemic challenges: when meetings are held, how meetings are held, what is the agenda, who moderates them and where, and what’s the goal. We all love to meet just to meet, but that’s probably not going to work if there’s not the crucial conversations that need to happen,” he said. Edelman's Tamara Snyder offered highlights from the latest Edelman Trust Barometer “Organizations that really want to do this understand [that] this is not just the nice thing to do. There’s a business imperative,” said Stoudemire. “We gotta figure it out, so we have to engage everybody.” The YMCA emphasizes its commitment to diversity with the phrase, "For All," but not everyone understands the benefits right away, said Hiu. “I was leading a training [session] once and a 20-year-old program director stood up in the middle and challenged me and said, ‘For All, for what? So your pictures look diverse and pretty? What is the point?’ My sort of stumbling response was so that everyone can feel welcome," he said, asserting that organizations need to provide common ground because their members may differ in gender, ethnicity, politics, faith, and other ways. In an earlier presentation, Tamara Snyder, executive vice president of employee experience at Edelman, said that 78% of the more than 33,000 global respondents in Edelman’s annual “Trust Barometer” survey this year agreed that how a company treats its employees is one of the best indicators of its trustworthiness. And trust matters. The vast majority of respondents agreed that, while a company's good reputation may get them to try a product, unless they trust the company, they will stop shopping the firm. “The bottom line is, when employees talk about the company, the world listens,” said Snyder. Nona Tepper is a freelance journalist based in Chicago. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, MarketWatch, Crain’s Chicago Business and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter here.

nonatepper | March 13, 2019
Do You Have a Healthy Workplace? It Matters in More Ways Than You Might Think

A healthy workplace today doesn't just mean a physically safe place, with proper ventilation and fire escapes. The concept has steadily evolved into a much broader idea of employee wellness, including such issues as mental health, sexual harassment, office conflicts, work-life balance and much more. When companies take an enlightened approach to a healthy work environment, it's not just employees who benefit. The companies do too, because they have a stronger hand in recruiting and retaining good workers, as well as helping them be more productive, said a panel of experts last week at the From Day One conference in Chicago, moderated by John Pletz, who covers technology for Crain's Chicago Business. One of the hardest things for workers to deal with is change—and there's a lot of it going around these days. GE Capital, the financial-services arm of General Electric, has gone through drastic restructuring since the financial crisis of a decade ago. “We had to train our leaders to have one-on-one conversations about feelings, which in financial services doesn’t happen,” said Rohini Shankar, senior VP of GE Capital Industrial Finance. “We’ve been going through such a tough time, but because leaders care, employees feel that they are valued. They’re willing to stay and go the extra mile. That translates into business results.” Allstate's Harris spoke about the challenges of talking about mental health in the workplace For GE Capital, the whole dynamic of the business was upended. “When you’re going through a business struggle, when the mood of the business is no longer held by the momentum of the growth of the business, how do we retain employees to make sure the work gets done, and to go on this journey?" GE Capital's leaders asked themselves these questions, Shankar said. Among other things, the company decided to create a feedback system so employees could respond to management's announcements of new developments. When layoffs were going to occur, the company told employees up to a year in advance, so they could prepare emotionally and financially, and contracted with an outside agency to help them find new positions, she said. One of the reasons that companies need to take increasing responsibility for worker health and happiness is that many people don't have the support systems earlier generations had. “We used to rely on families and churches and communities. We find that those aren’t supporting them—and organizations are feeling the pain of employees,” said Kenneth Matos, leader of people science at Culture Amp, an employee-engagement firm. “They’re breaking down physically, mentally, financially. So [companies are] getting ahead of some of these issues and trying to make for more sustainable and enduring employees.” Sensing that employees want more community involvement, the leaders of Quantum Health, a company that helps employees navigate the health-care system, sought to build on that sentiment. "One of the things I learned was how many people join us because they see our community awareness and how many partnerships we have, which we treat as a benefit," said Tony Callander, senior vice president of human resources. "We support a lot of different groups, but didn’t realize what a great driver of talent that was. So we shifted our recruiting efforts to community involvement, being more available, being there, taking resumes, taking applications at events." Rachel Ernst, VP of employee success at Reflektive Companies that trust employees with more information, rather than being overcautiously reticent, are likely to foster more trust in return, the experts said. For example, if a firm implements a policy that allows employees to work from home, it should explain why it's doing that and how it will benefit various workers—and allow them to voice their opinions about it. “When there isn’t trust, you spend more time and effort on control systems,” said Matos. “All the layers that slow down your business, that drive everyone out the door, that can create complications.” Getting employees to speak up about painful issues isn't easy. Matos said companies should start the process by polling employees on small, actionable issues and then reacting to the feedback. “The thing that can go wrong is that they’re going to go into a room of people who’ve felt their voice has been silenced for years and expect suddenly to get them to be talkative,” Matos said. Mental health is one of those issues that many people dread to talk about, especially in a work environment. Christy Harris, the Allstate insurance company's vice president of talent management, benefits and inclusive diversity, said she was talking with a friend recently who shared that she had suffered from depression and had attempted suicide. Her friend’s willingness to open up about her mental-health struggles inspired Harris to take a step in favor of more openness on the issue. After “a little bit of perseverance” getting the idea through senior management, Harris said that last year, on World Suicide Prevention Day, Allstate screened a video of employees who had been affected by suicide talking about their experiences, as well as an expert who outlined warning signs and support services. “We weren’t sure how it was going to be received and we were really sort of nervous about the reception of it,” Harris said. “But I’ll tell you the number of emails I got thanking us for being bold and being courageous and leading with this example really gave us momentum to really bring those issues out in the open.” Employers need to recognize when certain jobs are more than typically stressful. At Quantum Health, many workers are advocates for people undergoing health problems, which can be stressful for Quantum's people as well. "Our mission is built on caring for people," Callander said, "and how do we care for people who are on the other side of the phone and are our employees?” One of the biggest drivers of employee well-being is hope for the future, a sense among employees that they're going places with the company. Lori Healy, CEO of Chicago's Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority (MPEA), noted that retaining young people is a challenge for the public organization since older employees “love their job so much, the benefits are fantastic, nobody ever wants to leave.” Alexi Robichaux, co-founder and CEO of BetterUp As a way to attract and retain young talent, MPEA has instituted a new maternity policy for growing families, which included installing Mamava lactation rooms "all over" its McCormick Place convention hall. Among other retention-oriented benefits, the MPEA started reimbursing employees up to $10,000 per year to complete their college or master’s degree, she said. “Our finance department, which is 11 people, ten of them have used that tuition-reimbursement program and we have kept every single person in there. It is one white male and everybody else is diverse,” Healy said. “It’s been a great way to encourage people’s education and keep them as employees of the organization. It’s been really incredibly fulfilling.” In earlier keynote presentations, Rachel Ernst, VP of employee success at Reflektive, a people-management platform, spoke about how to manage gender pay equity through the employee lifecycle, and Alexi Robichaux, co-founder and CEO of BetterUp, a company that integrates behavioral science and employee coaching, addressed the importance of a sense of purpose in the workplace. Nona Tepper is a freelance journalist based in Chicago. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, MarketWatch, Crain’s Chicago Business and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter here.

nonatepper | March 12, 2019
Products from Women-owned Companies to Get Their Own Label

Consumers are showing a growing interest in the background of the products they buy: What's their environmental impact? Are the ingredients safe? Are the factory workers treated fairly? Now comes a way to identify products and services from women-owned businesses. Fashion designer Rebecca Minkoff, famed for her handbags and accessories, is planning to launch a "female founder" symbol so shoppers can use their pocketbook to help those businesses succeed. "First and foremost, we want a symbol that can be recognized on packaging, or websites, or storefronts," Minkoff told USA Today small-business columnist Rhonda Abrams. "We want to galvanize a community to buy from and support each other... We can educate the consumer in the [same] way that she's been educated to turn over and see [if a product] is non-GMO or organic." Minkoff launched the Female Founder Collective last September; it already has 3,000 members. The product symbol is one goal—"an overwhelming majority of women (82%) are more likely to buy from companies owned by other women, if they only knew who they were," Minkoff's website says—but another is to create a movement and support network. "The goal is to have a directory of all these [women-owned] brands," said Minkoff. "It will be a b2c [business to consumer] directory, and a b2b [business to business] portal for these companies to continue to help one another." The designer has also launched a partnership with Visa to help empower and educate female entrepreneurs. Today, which is International Women's Day—March is also Women's History Month—the Female Founder Collective and Visa's She's Next program, a global initiative, are hosting a series of workshops in New York City to offer women insights on how to grow their businesses. The collective and the She's Next program plan to offer an array of resources and opportunities, "from streamlining payment methods to linking women small-business owners with like-minded peers and experts," says Visa.  

fromdayone | March 08, 2019
Managing a Diverse Workforce in a Changing City

Recruiting a diverse workforce often means developing a more diverse recruitment playbook—one with strategies that can differ from block to block if necessary, so the message can be calibrated to the audience. That’s one of the lessons that Chicago’s human-resources commissioner, Soo Choi, says she’s learned during an eight-year career leading the department. Choi’s remarks this week at the From Day One conference in Chicago had a reflective tone, which is fitting as the city approaches a turning point. There’s a mayoral runoff election in April, and two-term incumbent Rahm Emanuel isn’t on the ballot. That gave Choi, who was named commissioner of Chicago’s HR department shortly after Emanuel’s election in 2011, an opportunity to take stock of her department’s progress. She focused on her efforts to improve equity and diversity in the city’s hiring practices. Diversity “is the city’s passion,” Choi said. It’s “definitely our strong belief that our workforce should reflect the demographics of the city.” Choi, an attorney, came to the job after spending five years monitoring city hiring practices on behalf of Chicago’s Office of Inspector General. City hiring practices had been under federal oversight since the early 1970s, owing to a history of jobs handed as rewards for political patronage. One of Choi’s signature accomplishments as HR commissioner came in 2014, when the city was finally released from that oversight. However, last week Chicago's troubled police department went under federal oversight while it undergoes a reform process. Conroy and Choi after their onstage conversation at the conference At the From Day One conference, where Choi was interviewed by Lorraine Conroy, director of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Center for Healthy Work, Choi focused on another of her most substantial challenges: recruiting and managing a diverse city workforce. She has found that successful recruitment of African-American and Latino candidates depends on tailored messaging that sometimes needs to varied by neighborhood. For example, during a push to hire minority police officers, Choi’s team determined “that in some neighborhoods, people really took the advice of their churches; in other places, maybe it was the gym or the barbershop. We really looked at it in granular detail to figure out, with the resources we had, how to communicate with people to tell them about the opportunity, get them excited about applying, and encourage them to participate,” she said. “I'm really proud of those efforts because they really made a large difference.” Recently, Choi has aimed to apply the same playbook to a similar challenge: the city’s difficulty in attracting and hiring Latinos, despite that group’s growing share of the city’s overall population. Latinos represent about one third of the city's 2.7 million residents, but reportedly hold only 15% to 17% of the city's 35,000 municipal jobs. A dearth of applicants “tells us that we are losing something in the communication,” says Choi. In response, she’s begun partnering with career-development organizations focused on the Latino community, as well as with the City Council’s Latino Caucus. “We’re working with them closely to figure out what are we doing here that isn't quite making the mark,” said Choi. “Those kinds of initiatives, I hope, will produce better results.” Last Spring, Choi hired Marquis Miller as the city’s first-ever chief diversity officer. She said Miller has been useful in fine-tuning the city’s hiring processes as well as in reviewing the policies and work environments of differing city departments to make them more friendly to workers from diverse backgrounds. “We wanted to engage departments to really think about what kind of workplace cultures they actually have,” Choi said. Having those conversations throughout an organization as large and diverse as the City of Chicago was “a monumental challenge,” Choi said—but it’s one she says has been worthwhile. One of the new elements introduced with Miller was a pilot program used for testing proposed policy or procedural changes. The city now tests its changes on five or six departments. “That way we can kind of see how effective they are before we do larger-scale change,” said Choi. A related initiative is making sure that city employees at all levels feel empowered to share their feedback—including their frustrations—with Choi’s team. She said she has begun to share more employee complaints with department managers, and also prioritized follow-up to see how those team leaders responded. Even when employee complaints don’t qualify as policy violations, “often they clearly tell us there's something going on. So we decided to start using that information to communicate with department heads and say, ‘Look, you know, we really think you need to take a closer look at this particular division because we're seeing complaints that at least show us that people are not happy,’” said Choi. Ashley Oster and Julie Caldwell of E4E Relief at their breakout session Choi’s goal, then, is a city workforce that is hired equitably and reflects the city’s diversity, and also that finds their workplace to be one in which workers feel valued and accepted. That’s not easy in a city as large as Chicago, but as Emanuel’s tenure as mayor approaches its end, Choi believes she has made important progress. Breakout sessions: Earlier in the day at the From Day One conference, J Zac Stein, chief operating officer of Lattice, led a workshop on the often-uncomfortable art of giving feedback to employees; Melissa Anderson, co-founder and president of Public Good, spoke about the power of inspiring people to take social action alongside a corporate brand; and Julie Caldwell and Ashley Oster of E4E Relief told how their organization helps companies support their employees in need and build good will in their communities by administering charitable grants and managing employee-relief programs. Steve Hendershot is a multimedia journalist in Chicago. He writes about technology and entrepreneurship for Crain’s Chicago Business, and also is the author of a bestselling book about the videogame series Street Fighter. Follow him on Twitter at @stevehendershot

Steve Hendershot | March 08, 2019
Translating Corporate Values into Social Impact—and Deeper Employee Relationships

We live in an era when trust is under strain. The prevalence of ideological polarization, economic instability and uncertainty over the reliability of news reporting has tested the bonds that underpin society. As people’s faith wanes in traditional societal institutions—not to mention social media—they are turning elsewhere for trustworthy guidance. And according to a global survey released in January, the Edelman Trust Barometer, a leading beneficiary of that reallocated trust is “My employer.” That shift has weighty implications for leaders who sense both the opportunity and responsibility of an era when corporate values will increasingly set the tone for broader societal values. What’s more, it’s unlikely to be a blip. “Every trend line that we see [suggests] that this is going to be even more important as we look at the future,” says Seth Green, founding director of the social enterprise-focused Baumhart Center at Loyola University Chicago. This week, Green moderated a panel at the From Day One conference in Chicago, focused on how organizations can lead by establishing strong values and following through on them. Here are three steps organizations can take to ensure that they’re worthy of the trust employees are placing in them, according to the panelists: Be Trustworthy Green and his panelists agreed that for employers, the key to making of the most of the trust placed in them is, well, to be trustworthy. That means not only outlining a collection of noble corporate values, but taking care to live them out. “I’m being tested every day in terms of my decisions, my behaviors, my attitude,” says Howard Sherman, CEO of Good360, an Alexandria, Virginia-based nonprofit that distributes excess inventory from retailers to charitable organizations. Specifically, Sherman pointed to flashpoint moments such as decisions that may put the short-term interests of the executive at odds with the company’s long-term interests. “You get a chance each and every day, particularly when you're leading an organization, to increase the level of trust between you and an organization. But man, if I just trip up—and nobody's perfect—it is so, so hard to get it back,” he said. Abbott’s Daugherty talked about her company’s global social-impact programs Reciprocate Your Employees’ Trust Just as with interpersonal relationships, organizations do well to remember that trust is a two-way street, said Bob Dixon, head of sustainability for Siemens. Dixon said that when Siemens changed its policy for expense reimbursements to one that placed more trust in employees, the change was palpable. Even though the process tweak was minor, “it was so profound to a lot of people, because it was like, ‘They trust me, and I trust them,’” said Dixon. “It starts building mutual trust. A lot of times I think we say we want our employees to trust us but we don’t really trust them. And so that's what I encourage people to do, is figure out how to trust your employees—allowing them to talk, to use social media, to make decisions.” Demonstrate Commitment to Social Good The notion of the triple-win—the idea that a smart business practice can benefit your company, its customers and also deliver a social or economic benefit—is a popular one, but of course easier to dream about than to achieve. Yet this “mutualism,” not traditional altruism, is the future of corporate philanthropy, according to Good360’s Sherman. Taking the time to find these opportunities and capitalize on them conveys your organization’s commitment as well as its creativity. What’s more, the identification and pursuit of these opportunities can help deepen the relationship between you and your employees. “We get this alignment of personal purpose with organizational purpose,” says Jon Powell, executive director of the People Advisory Services group at consultancy EY, who spoke at the conference later in the day. “It’s part of how we establish resonance.” Here are three examples from widely divergent industries where business leaders were able to deliver triple-wins: Best Buy Teen Tech Centers. Electronics retailer Best Buy operates training programs in underserved communities aimed at preparing students for careers in technology. There’s a social benefit there, sure, but it’s not just charity. “We're looking at those not just to help teens from underserved neighborhoods get access to tech and tech education, but as a talent pipeline for us and for our partners,” said Andrea Wood, Best Buy’s head of social impact. “That's where you have the greatest impact, [by preparing someone for a job] and not just by cutting a check.” Univision Chicago’s Christmas party coverage. When TV station Univision Chicago was approached about covering a Christmas party for families at a struggling urban school last December, the station not only covered the event but recruited a corporate sponsor to make the event even more special. It was an unconventional move for a news organization, but one that made Christmas brighter for the families in question. Jon Powell, of the consultancy EY, talked about having a sense of purpose “A lot of trust can come as a result of finding that intersection [of interests] without pretending that we’re too disconnected from reality,” says Teri Arvesu, VP of content for Univision Chicago. Abbott’s decentralized healthcare initiative. Healthcare manufacturer Abbott is investigating whether its diagnostic tools can be used in remote African areas, far from the big-city hospitals where the devices were intended for use. “If we can get access closer to people who live in very rural, hard-to-reach, low-income parts of the world, and if we can actually raise the standard of care that they have access to—and we’re able to sell a product at the same time—that’s a win-win. And there's an incredible business case for that,” says Jenna Daugherty, divisional VP for social responsibility at Abbott. Employers increasingly find themselves in a strange role, not only as providers and creators, but as a trusted anchor in a turbulent time. When they prove worthy of that trust, both their organizations and employees benefit—and, often, so does society. Steve Hendershot is a multimedia journalist in Chicago. He writes about technology and entrepreneurship for Crain’s Chicago Business, and also is the author of a bestselling book about the videogame series Street Fighter. Follow him on Twitter at @stevehendershot    

Steve Hendershot | March 08, 2019
How 'Believe Chicago' Connected AT&T With Its Neighbors

In the city of Chicago, the twin plagues of gun violence and unemployment determine the experience of many who live and work in neighborhoods far from the sparkling high rises of downtown. In this other part of the shining city, gun violence is so high that the Wall Street Journal reported last year that Navy medics are prepared for tours of duty by training at the trauma unit at Cook County’s Stroger Hospital. The number of homicides has dropped over the last three years, down from 771 in 2016 to 561 last year. But that positive trend—shaped by nonprofit groups, religious congregations, local activists and government programs—can use all the help it can get. Now it’s getting it from a new source: AT&T. Eileen Mitchell, president of AT&T Illinois The world’s largest telecom company (2018 revenues: $170.8 billion) launched a new program last October called Believe Chicago to focus on injecting opportunity into 19 Chicago neighborhoods with the highest rates of unemployment and violence. It’s not a random selection—many of AT&T’s local employees live or work in those very neighborhoods. “When we did the research and saw how many employees and retirees we had living in these neighborhoods, how many stores we had, we determined that we had an obligation to step forward,” says Eileen Mitchell, president of AT&T Illinois, one of the state’s largest private-sector employers. AT&T has a history of volunteerism and community service within its workforce, but at a time when the relationship between big companies and big cities can be contentious, AT&T wanted to build a sustainable, employee-driven program in partnership with Chicago's neighborhoods. So AT&T's managers fanned out. Across the city, headquarters staff met with employees in stores, call centers, and equipment garages. “The magic started to happen when we went out and talked to our employees,” recalls Mitchell. “They were very close to the issue and there was an extreme amount of enthusiasm for the idea that we needed to get involved. The conversations that we had informed and inspired the work that we did and the program that we built.” One of the program's initiatives is Learn Chicago, which provides skills training for young people, including in retail stores From there, AT&T went even deeper into the communities, convening organizers and activists, and asking them to gather residents who could share their perspective of what was happening around them and where there were gaps in services and support. One of the biggest gaps? Economic opportunity. Well, Mitchell reasoned, one of the most powerful opportunities a large company can leverage is hiring. This led to one of the pillars of the Believe Chicago program: skills training and connection to job openings. Last month, AT&T hired their 500th employee from the 19 neighborhoods who came up through the Believe Chicago program. The programs milestones will be celebrated on March 15 with the debut of a documentary entitled, Beacons of Hope: Stories of Strength from Chicago, launching on the AT&T Audience Network. With early support from company executives including John Donovan, CEO of AT&T Communications, the Believe initiative has grown in just a year into a national program with offshoots in New York City, Dallas, Atlanta and Detroit. More than a dozen additional cities are planning to launch their own Believe efforts later this year. The Believe program joins a variety of job-skills programs that AT&T supports, including Girls Who Code and All Star Code. Eileen Mitchell’s passion for Believe Chicago is built from her three-pronged background: 12 years as an AT&T executive, a stint as Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel’s chief of staff, where she became familiar with the challenges facing neighborhoods, and a year volunteering for the archdiocese of Chicago to develop an office of violence prevention. “All institutions have different assets that they can bring to bear,” Mitchell says on the role that corporations should fill in local communities. “The violence issue in Chicago is not one person’s to solve. Government can’t do it alone. Private enterprise can’t do it alone. And the faith community can’t do it alone. The real power comes when government, the private sector and the faith community can all come together with one goal in mind: to lift these neighborhoods, to invest in them, and to create opportunity that doesn’t exist.” That corporations are just one integral piece of the health of local communities in which their employees and customers live and work points to a key tenet of the program: sustainability. The program may still be young, but by focusing on community partnerships, job growth, and training, Believe Chicago has its eyes on a commitment to the Windy City that will extend many years into the future. Emily Ludolph is a senior editor at 99U and an alum of TED Conferences and Vassar College. She has published in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Narratively, Artsy, 99U, Quartz, and Design Observer

emilyludolph | March 04, 2019
'Making a Business Case' May Not Be the Best Pitch for Social Action

If you want to persuade management at your company to take action on a social issue, you need to make the business case for it. That's the current thinking, at least. But you might do just as well—or better—by making the case that it's the right thing to do, especially for your particular company, a new study has found. Four management professors interviewed more than 400 U.S. employees across several organizations, asking whether they had ever "spoken up to management about an important 'social issue' to try to create a positive change that they thought would benefit others or society." Of those who did, the researchers asked them about their approach and how successful they were in gaining company support. Photo by Rawpixel on Unsplash The findings were consistent—and against the conventional wisdom. "We found that economic language was never significantly related to effectiveness—managers were no more or less likely to devote time, attention, money, or other resources to address the social issue when the employee made a business case," the researchers wrote in Harvard Business Review. Using moral language in general was no more helpful. "However, we found that when employees used moral language and framed the social issue as part of the organization’s values and mission, they were far more successful. By tailoring the moral message to also fit with something perceived as legitimate—what the company stood for—it provided cover, license, and an impetus for the manager to put energy into working on the social problem," the professors wrote. In recent years, when companies have addressed a range of social issues, from diversity to sustainability, they've made the case to their stakeholders that it's not just about doing good, but about the bottom line. That may well be true, especially for companies taking the long view. But the new research shows another apparently effective way to persuade managers, and in the HBR piece the researchers offer employees several important takeaways on how to make change happen at their companies.

fromdayone | March 04, 2019
Employee Burnout Is a Problem. Is More Vacation the Solution?

The idea for CLIF Bar, the popular energy bar, didn't arise in the office. It was on a 175-mile bike ride, when a California baker named Gary Erickson bit into one of a series of energy bars he’d packed for the trip, and became fed up. “Suddenly, despite my hunger, I couldn’t take another bite,” he later wrote. “I thought, ‘I could make a better bar than this!’”And he did. A few years later, in 1991, Erickson debuted his new product at a bike show, and within its first year of production sales exceeded $700,000. Six years after that, his company’s revenue surpassed $20 million. Along the way, Erickson never forgot where he was when the idea struck him.With CLIF Bar, which was named after Erickson's father, Clifford, the entrepreneur committed to making the world “a better place to live, work, and eat.” As he built the company into one of America’s best places to work, an early, noteworthy employee perk was the ability to take an eight-week sabbatical every seven years.The company's leaders instituted the sabbatical program because it wanted CLIF Bar employees to “be able to have that time in their life to take a long trip, or pursue something educational, just to have a break—and a long break—from work where you can pursue things outside of work,” says Jennifer Freitas, the company’s director of people, learning and engagement. “Whatever those things may be that can recharge you: creatively, physically, emotionally, spiritually," she said. "You have that time, stress free, because you’ve got a job waiting for you, and you’re getting paid to have that recharge.”Americans are spending an increasing amount of time on the job. According to a recent piece in The Nation, one-third of the U.S. workforce logs in 45 hours or more at their jobs per week, and the amount of hours Americans spend at work each year has risen nearly 8% percent since 1979. The statistics partly account for the rise in employee burnout across the country, with two-thirds of workers reporting that they feel burned out at work at least some of the time.Compounding the problem—frequently described as a crisis—is the fact that the U.S. is the only advanced economy in the world that does not mandate paid vacation time, with its workers comparatively taking the fewest vacation days per year.This does nobody any good. Downtime and adequate sleep have an abundance of health benefits, and in the context of business, time away from work ultimately leads to greater productivity. Thus, increasing vacation time is something that not only an employee could get behind, but the employer as well.Trends appear to be going in that direction, with a growing demand for employee perks, including more robust vacation time. Some companies have even implemented unlimited vacation-time policies, under which employees are trusted to take the amount they need.Photo by Adrian on Unsplash.“Human beings need rest and relaxation to truly recharge,” says Katie Burke, the chief people officer at HubSpot, a business-growth software company, who frequently writes and speaks on the topic of corporate culture. “I view vacation as a vital part of helping our employees live fulfilling lives outside of work. In terms of health benefits, it’s been well-documented that taking regular vacations helps lower your stress levels, increases overall happiness, and ultimately I think makes people more balanced leaders.”In a piece she wrote for Inc.com, Burke explained that HubSpot’s unlimited vacation policy did nothing to deter people from responsibly showing up to work and being productive members of the staff. She agrees that similar vacation packages are growing in popularity across industries as well.When advising business owners about paid time off, Burke says that a company’s “policy and approach is only as good as the degree to which [its] leaders live and breathe it.” At HubSpot, for example, vacation time is placed on their list of monthly priorities for the company’s leadership team. “Doing so makes it clear that taking vacation isn’t just OK, it’s actively encouraged because our executives take proper time off to rest and recharge, so any employee at any level should feel free to do so, too.”Critics of unlimited vacation time say that employees can take advantage of such a policy, and it can even spur unhealthy competition among staff members to take fewer days off than their colleagues. A recent Washington Post story noted that without a clear number of allotted vacation days, when a worker is laid off they may not be reimbursed for unused vacation time as well.Of course, companies don’t have to go to such extremes with their vacation policies either. There is a middle ground between zero and infinity for allowed vacation days, and many companies have come up with other creative ways to structure time-off employee perks.Based in Redwood City, Calif., the software-development company Evernote, for example, doubles down on vacation time, issuing a $1,000 stipend to employees who take one week of vacation each year, in addition to its unlimited-vacation policy.Brad O’Neil, Evernote’s head of people, says the stipend—designed to offset travel costs or to even enhance staycations—has layers of benefits for the company.“We just use it as incentive to make sure that people do take time away and enjoy their families and do what makes them happy outside of the office,” O’Neil says. “A refreshed, relaxed employee is going to be more productive." But it also helps the company. Ffrom a talent-acquisition perspective, I think it’s something that differentiates us,” he says.O’Neil calls the Evernote team “close-knit,” devoted to a corporate culture of kindness and helpfulness amid their colleagues. The vacation program is vital in maintaining that vibe, as it helps Evernote with retention, which O’Neil says is important “because the battle for quality talent in the Bay Area is pretty epic.” He adds that Evernote wants its employees to have long tenures the company “in order to keep the legacy of information [in-house], and just to have solid knowledge of Evernote and the products and the people.”The Denver-based company FullContact, developers of a contact-management platform, similarly offers what they call “paid, paid vacation.” In addition to their unlimited-vacation policy, for workers who take vacation and go entirely off the grid, they get an additional $7,500. (As part of this deal, workers must include in their auto-response, out-of-office emails that they’re deleting any emails they receive while on vacation, and instruct the sender to resend the email when the vacationer is back on the job.)“The reasoning?” the company asks rhetorically on its website. “$7,500 is enough for a family of four to take a nice vacation to Mexico for a week.” Employees don’t have to do precisely that; the company’s blog post on the topic says workers could use the special paid vacation to do everything from sit around the house “watching bad cable all week” to running around naked at the Burning Man festival.Mike Nemeth, FullContact’s vice president of human resources, says the policy “encourages employees to re-engage in their personal life,” and points out that the CEO, Bart Lorang, regularly goes “off the grid” to recharge, setting the example.FullContact’s blog post also asks, “Is $7,500 too much? Too little? We don’t know. It’s a giant experiment. We’ll find out.” Nemeth says of the “experiment,” so far, “It’s an amazing benefit, but it’s unusual, and people don’t always recognize that it’s part of their total compensation package—they see it as a ‘nice-to-have.’ But employees love it, and explaining its value is a good problem for me, in HR, to have.”Then there’s the eight-week sabbatical at CLIF Bar, which comes on top of a generous vacation policy, work-from-home options and bi-weekly Fridays off.“We’ve always had this focus on people, taking care of people as whole people, focused on really helping them live the life they want to live, which shows up in a lot of different ways,” says Jennifer Freitas of CLIF Bar.What do employees do on their sabbaticals? One employee earned yoga-teaching certification, while Freitas used her own sabbatical to travel across Africa. Whatever it takes, she says, to keep CLIF Bar workers from “feeling stuck, stagnant, or stale,” which falls in line with the company’s mission of creating food that “feeds and inspires the adventure in all of us.”Michael Stahl is a freelance writer and editor. A former high school English teacher, he has written for Rolling Stone, Vice, the Village Voice, Narratively, Splitsider, Outside Magazine and other publications.

Michael Stahl | February 28, 2019
Are Stock Buybacks Good for Shareholders but Bad for Society?

When the Coca-Cola Co. announced last week that it plans to buy back 150 million of its shares, it joined an epic buying spree by U.S. corporations. In 2018, companies announced plans to buy back more than $1 trillion of their outstanding shares, a record total. And the momentum is continuing this year. The goal is to boost their share prices by taking some of their stock off the market, which is generally good news for stockholders, including the executives of those companies. In fact, the buybacks are a key driver of the stock market's current surge. But the buyback binge now faces a backlash from elected officials on both sides of the aisle, who say that the practice rewards asset-rich investors but fails to benefit the vast majority of Americans. Senators Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, and Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, raised the battle flag earlier this month with an op-ed piece in the New York Times, declaring that in recent decades "corporate boardrooms have become obsessed with maximizing only shareholder earnings to the detriment of workers and the long-term strength of their companies, helping to create the worst level of income inequality in decades." Between 2008 and 2017, the senators said, "466 of the S&P 400 companies spent around $4 trillion on buybacks, equal to 53% of profits." By giving so much to shareholders, the companies failed to reinvest those profits in research and development or better wages and benefits for their workers. In fact, some companies including Walmart and Wells Fargo have announced stock buybacks even while planning to lay off thousands of employees. As a remedy, the senators said they plan to introduce legislation that will "prohibit a corporation from buying back its own stock unless it invests in workers and communities first, including things like paying all workers at least $15 an hour, providing seven days of paid sick leave, and offering decent pensions and more reliable health benefits." Within days, Republican Senator Marco Rubio launched his own plan to curb stock buybacks. His legislation would end the preferential tax treatment given to stock buybacks, in which profits are taxed as capital gains rather than as dividends. "We have too often failed to make the well-being of working Americans the terms for market success," Rubio wrote in a report from the Senate Small Business Committee, which he chairs. One reason corporations are pouring money into stock buybacks is that afters years of strong economic growth, they're awash in profits. "Companies often don't know what to do with their excess cash," wrote David Kelly, chief global strategist for JPMorgan Funds, in his weekly report for investors. But, as CNN reported, he thinks a clampdown would be a mistake. "It is far more efficient to let companies distribute the cash rather than encourage them to invest in areas that seem less profitable," he wrote, adding that "it is unnerving to see politicians from the left and right once again attack corporate greed as the source of all the nation's problems." Proposals to clamp down on the buybacks fail to appreciate a key economic function they provide, wrote Shawn Tully in Fortune. "Repurchases channel corporate earnings from old-economy stalwarts lacking profitable places to reinvest the cash to the industries of the future," he argued. "It's the cash distributed by a P&G or GM that, through this fluid ecosystem, funds expansion in fast-growers hungry for capital, in areas from cloud-based services to e-commerce distribution centers to electric cars." No less a sage than Warren Buffett came out in defense of stock buybacks last week in his widely followed annual letter, saying that his company Berkshire Hathaway plans a significant buyback. But he cautioned that such repurchases have to be done in a disciplined way. "Obviously, repurchases should be price-sensitive: Blindly buying an overpriced stock is value-destructive, a fact lost on many promotional or ever-optimistic CEOs," he wrote. How will the political debate shake out? In an editorial, the Washington Post proposed that "government should intervene subtly, if at all, and certainly not with the regulatory sledgehammer" proposed by Schumer, Sanders and other legislators. "Critics of stock buybacks are saying, in effect, that elected officials or regulators may know better than companies themselves what should be done with extra cash. It is far from clear that this is true, given that we have just gone through a long period in which both stock buybacks and job creation grew," the Post's editors wrote. "Best for Congress to make sure there really is a serious problem before trying to legislate a solution."  

fromdayone | February 25, 2019
How a Grocery Chain Grew a Local Program into a Core Value

The supermarket chain Wegmans is beloved for a lot of things, including being one of the best companies to work for. Among U.S. grocery chains, it typically ranks No. 1 with customers too. In Brooklyn, N.Y., where Wegmans plans to open its first store in New York City this fall, anticipation has been building for years. Yet the family-owned company, based in Rochester, N.Y., has a lesser-known but equally impressive status: as a standard-setter in sustainability. Wegmans has made it a company-wide effort, from reduced emissions to zero waste. At the company's zero-waste pilot store in Canandaigua, N.Y., the level of recycling has reached 82.6%, with the company's other stores close behind.  What's striking about the company's commitment is that it didn't start with a long-term vision, but with a small, local initiative. Jason Wadsworth, who oversees Wegmans’ sustainability program, can trace the DNA of its success to a small program that was never expected to roll up into a program that now directs business choices at the company. The industry-leading initiative started out as a program to donate unused, perishable food. Wadsworth told From Day One how the little program scaled up, providing a case study for anyone in a company trying to get a similar campaign off the ground. Wegmans has been running the Perishable Pick Up Program for the last three decades, predating the sustainability program, which is now 12 years old. For years, food-pantry trucks have rolled up to the loading docks of local stores as frequently as three to seven days a week or to distribution centers at the end of a reverse-logistics chain. The program donated 8 million lbs. of food in 2017, including bakery products and nonperishables like dented cans.  Workers at a Wegmans pick out perishable items for donation, including baked goods As food pantries start to shift their requests toward healthier options, Wegmans upped their produce donations of fruits and vegetables to match. “We did it because it’s the right thing to do, first and foremost,” says Wadsworth, who credits the values of the late Robert Wegman, the company's former chairman—"doing the right thing, caring, and making a difference”—with setting fertile ground for the donation program. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 11.8% of households in America, or 40 million people, are "food insecure," meaning that their regular eating patterns are disrupted because they can't afford enough food or live in "food deserts." Though Wegmans has expanded to nearly 100 stores in recent years, the Perishable Pick Up programs remain local, run by each store with local partners. Besides the benefits to local communities and the reduction of food waste, Wadsworth pointed out that there's a business case as well. “Those folks you would be donating to today may not be your customers; they may not be able to afford it. But at some point, they will be able to afford it when they get back on their feet.” In short, the Wegmans Perishable Pick Up Program is a window into the trait that makes the company a good local actor: long-term thinking.    Twelve years ago, the company set the more ambitious goal of zero waste. Now, in addition to pantry donations, unused products are composted or taken to farms for animal feed. The program is built on several business cases, including responding to consumer affinity toward sustainable companies and avoiding the expense of unused-food disposal. The sustainability program is not yet cost-neutral, since R&D on programs like composting require large up-front costs, but that’s Wadsworth’s eventual goal. “We shouldn’t pay more for sustainability,” he says.  The program has had unexpected benefits as the company expands into new states where regulations may require sustainability practices. New York is the second city where Wegmans has met an existing food-waste ban, which prohibits supermarkets and large restaurants from putting unused food in landfills. Thanks to its long-term investment in processes like the perishable-donation program, Wegmans is set up in advance to comply with such regulations. For the many companies dealing in food and beverages (manufacturers, groceries, wholesalers, caterers, and farmers), the EPA has created a step by step guide on how to build a donation-logistics program to help reduce food-waste’s role as the single largest contributor to municipal landfills, not to mention saving the energy and water needed to break down food waste for other purposes.  For anyone interested in pushing their organizations into sustainable or other value-driven policies, Wadsworth suggests starting local. “Typically, we start with one store and it morphs until eventually it becomes a company program,” he says. True, not every company is family run, with decades of long-term thinking, but Wadsworth still believes it’s possible to change a big company by launching a program in a local branch. “Just do it,” he says. “You’ve got to start somewhere.” Emily Ludolph is a senior editor at 99U and an alum of TED Conferences and Vassar College. She has published in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Narratively, Artsy, 99U, Quartz, and Design Observer

emilyludolph | February 21, 2019
Is It Safe to Speak Up in Your Workplace?

When the term "workplace safety" comes up, most people may think of construction sites and hazardous materials. But health and well-being is an issue for all workplaces—and not all dangers are physical. In fact, the social and emotional challenges that employees can face on the job—from discrimination and harassment to lack of recognition and feedback—can be even more insidious. Recognizing this, many enlightened companies have become more determined to foster a healthy work environment with an emphasis on clear values and open communication. “A safe work environment is one where people feel comfortable having challenging conversations with their manager," said Rachel Ernst, vice president of employee success at Reflektive, a San Francisco-based company that provides a suite of people-management programs. "Psychological safety is one of the most foundational things a company needs to set employees up for success.” Rachel Ernst, vice president of employee success at Reflektive From Day One talked with Ernst about the key strategies she recommends to companies aiming to foster a healthy corporate culture. Among them: 1.) Start with values Ernst said that anyone building a company from scratch, or managing a company at a turning point, would do well to determine their values and build them into the core of the business. “For companies looking to build a healthy culture, values are incredibly important to start with. Hire for, reward for, and act out those values on a daily basis.” One of those values, Ernst said, should be “making sure that people feel comfortable voicing their opinions. In order to build this kind of environment, it's key that leaders are out there and are visible." This means participating in team meetings, company meetings, and one-on-one meetings, and being fully present in daily interactions. 2.) Be proactive Employees are more likely to speak up when they feel that their voices matter. Ernst advocates a three-step process: ask, listen, and act. In this process, managers ask a question, express that they heard what their employees had to say, and communicate what is going to happen in response. “Ultimately, we as managers exist to make sure employees feel valued in the organization and that they’re able to be productive. If managers listen to and take action based on employee feedback, employees are more likely to speak up and voice opinions or concerns.” 3.) Make training a priority Anti-harassment training is an essential step for companies new and old. Ernst’s own company holds a mandatory "Creating a Safe Work Environment" training session each year: two hours for managers, one hour for employees. While the company's home state of California requires that training occur only every other year for managers, Ernst recommends doing this type of training annually and globally, regardless of regional minimum standards. “Anything you do training on communicates the message that it’s important to the culture. You're saying to your employees: a safe work culture is very important to us, and this is what that means to us; when something contradictory to this happens, it’s not okay, and you need to let us know so we can take the right steps to address it." 4.) Create a feedback system Feedback shouldn't be a random process. Having a system in place encourages employees to think regularly about their work experience. It also creates a forum for individuals who may be less likely to address issues they’re seeing on their own. “It takes a system to really encourage the right thought process and create the right cadence for feedback to happen,” Ernst said. 5.) Address issues of all sizes Taking small issues seriously can prevent larger, ongoing problems, as well as build confidence and trust among employees. “I’d prefer a culture where people say more things than less. We can always get ahead of little behaviors that have the potential to turn into something much bigger," said Ernst. Employees may be unaware about how their behavior is perceived. "There are a lot of times that the behavior is very unintentional, and helping the employee understand how it could be perceived in a certain light makes all the difference. Giving someone the opportunity to change a behavior is also important.” Photo by Rawpixel on Unsplash 6.) Build up the positive According to Ernst, it takes three pieces of positive feedback to open a person up to constructive criticism. Systems that consistently reinforce employee successes provide a steady stream of positive feedback, making workers less defensive about feedback that might be otherwise considered negative. The idea is to create a growth-oriented mindset among employees. One measure Ernst suggests for setting the tone is a recognition wall, where individual and team accomplishments are celebrated. “A recognition wall is a mechanism that makes it easy and fun to give positive feedback. People will be more responsive to constructive conversations because they know that they’re supported and people believe that they can grow.” (For more information on how to implement real-time feedback and recognition walls at your organization, download Reflektive’s e-book “The Ultimate Guide to Real-Time Feedback.”) 7.) Be open with criticism “As humans, we’re not built perfectly. If I have a good manager, he or she wants to help me understand what I’m doing well so I can continue doing that, as well as how I’m standing in my own way sometimes — whether it’s in interactions with colleagues or customers. Taking the time to say those things reassures me that my manager cares about me as a person and values me," said Ernst. "Employees are then more likely to feel motivated to want to work for you and feel comfortable asking for help.” 8.) Don't avoid the difficult conversation Building personal rapport between managers and employees can help foster the trust needed to have difficult conversations. “If a manager shows confidence in being able to handle a challenging conversation with you, you feel more comfortable sharing with them, knowing that they will be able to handle it and take the right action. Having those harder conversations deepens trust,” Ernst said. 9.) Keep it frequent Managers should have regular check-ins with their employees. Keeping the conversations frequent helps ensure that there isn’t any pent-up feedback that hasn’t been given to the employee. Companies tend to be moving away from the traditional annual review, said Ernst, because employees would hear feedback from a manager about something from months before. The quicker an issue comes up, the faster an employee can adjust and grow. Definitely avoid: managers canceling one-on-one meetings and failing to reschedule them. 10.) Encourage employees to communicate candidly “Peer-to-peer feedback is one of the most important ways to motivate people. Employees are very interested in what people think about them,” said Ernst. The idea is to create bonds of trust—not just between workers and managers, but all through the staff. "When you don’t, you’re much more likely to go somewhere where you feel better connected with the people that you work with, because we all seek that connection as humans." Carina Livoti is a New York-based writer. She earned a degree in English at Harvard and spends a lot of time wondering whether strangers wearing earbuds on the subway are actually listening to anything

carinalivoti | February 12, 2019