Remote work sits at the intersection of many urgent issues that impact how we live and work today.
The demand for flexible work options has been driven by outside factors such as the housing crisis and the rising costs of living across major cities, the growing gig economy, and even longer and increasingly more stressful commutes by car or public transportation.
Meanwhile, advances in technology and cloud capabilities have made it easier for employees to work outside of the traditional office environment. The result is that an estimated 23 percent of the U.S. workforce now works remotely at least part of the time — a number expected to reach 50 percent this year.
With 40 percent of our employee population working virtually, my company, Ultimate Software, set out to study the state of remote work and how this growing trend is impacting the experience of fellow remote and in-office workers alike. We surveyed 1,000 U.S. employees nationwide, all of whom work for a company that has a mix of remote and in-office employees. What we found was quite unexpected.
Counter to the common narrative of remote workers as isolated and overlooked, the majority of them — and, surprisingly, women in particular — seem to be thriving when working outside of the traditional office setting. The data suggest that flexible work options may actually be helping women overcome barriers such as access to career growth and work-life balance.
These findings come at a time when our nation is grappling with important conversations surrounding equal pay, the #MeToo movement and how women are treated in the workplace. It’s important for business leaders and HR teams to pay attention to what women’s experiences tell us about improvements that still need to be made in traditional office settings.
Women Who Work Remotely Are Thriving
The prevailing media narrative around remote workers is that they are isolated, as they often miss out on in-office benefits, including team collaboration, company culture or access to HR. At worst, there’s a myth that remote workers are overlooked when it comes to career growth — out of sight, out of mind. But our survey data paint a different picture, particularly when you compare men’s and women’s experiences.
For example, our research found that women who work remotely were twice as likely to report proactively leveraging HR to resolve issues, when compared with in-office women. This gap did not exist between in-office men and remote men. Meanwhile, women who work from home were also more likely to feel confident that HR understands their needs and concerns — 67 percent agree or strongly agree that HR is aware of their needs, versus 57 percent of in-office women. Men tended to be even more confident — 73 percent of in-office and 72 percent of remote male workers agree or strongly agree.
This stronger connection with HR could be benefiting remote women workers’ overall career growth. They were the most likely to report a promotion in the last year, eclipsing men in either work environment: 57 percent of remote women reported being promoted in the last year, compared with 35 percent of in-office women, 51 percent of male remote workers, and 43 percent of male in-office workers. These women were also significantly more likely than in-office women to report room for growth in their current roles (80 percent of remote women versus 60 percent of in-office women).
The data also indicated a continued struggle for work-life balance among in-office women in particular. They were significantly more likely to report feeling guilty about taking paid time off than any other group (42 percent of in-office women versus 28 percent of remote women, 21 percent of in-office men and 18 percent of remote men).
Have Workplace Advances Left Women Behind?
A cursory glance at these numbers tells us that remote women workers are reaping valuable benefits. If you dig even deeper into the data, another startling trend emerges. While the reported experiences of remote and in-office women varied vastly when it came to career growth and a connection with HR, men tended to report similar experiences regardless of where they worked.
In fact, the experiences of remote women were often on par with their male counterparts who worked in the office or at home, while women who work in the office lagged behind all other groups significantly. What the data make clear is that women are feeling disconnected and disadvantaged in traditional office settings.
What is the answer? Should women be working from their home offices and kitchen tables for a better chance of a promotion and supportive work environment? Obviously, this is not the solution.
It’s not women who work in traditional office settings who should be paying attention to this data — it’s the people who lead and manage them. It’s evident that, while significant advances have been made to improve the work experiences of all employees, there is still work to be done.
How Leaders Can Make a Difference
While these issues may not exist in the same form at every company, these findings can serve as a starting point for HR leaders and business executives to take a closer look at their own companies. Real change begins by asking the right questions, and these stats provide a script.
Ask yourself: How are remote workers performing relative to in-office workers at your company? Are there significant gender gaps? The answers can be quantitative or anecdotal. Look for patterns in who’s accessing HR and training opportunities, who’s getting promoted — and who isn’t — and then ask why.
Once you’ve turned inward and asked some honest questions about your workplace, the next and most important step is to ask for feedback — and then keep asking. Gather feedback from employees in a safe, supportive way, and then encourage open dialogue. Various methods may work best for your organization, from mentorship and manager one-on-one meetings to employee surveys to creating a diversity and inclusion committee.
Regardless of whether your company has a remote workforce now, the ways in which we work are changing. Employee expectations are also changing.
Leadership has a particular responsibility to ensure a company weathers these changes by supporting all employees. A workplace revolution is coming. In many ways, it’s already started. Leadership must look inward to ensure their company is on the right side of that shift.
I’ve been hitting up a neighborhood eatery for several years now.
It’s adorned with funky artwork, airs an eclectic soundtrack and offers a menu featuring everything from a burger slathered in peanut butter to a tasty rotation of hand-made sausages. One week it might be venison, the next chorizo.
No matter the encased meat of the week, the Notorious D.O.G. is my go-to item.
I always feel comfortable stopping in. Not in a “Cheers” way where Norm and Cliff anchor one end of the bar and Frasier Crane holds down the other end and everybody knows my name, but instead for its casual neighborhood vibe.
As good as the food, drink and atmosphere are, what I’ve particularly appreciated is the staff camaraderie. It’s a talented young team that with few exceptions has worked together since my initial visit. I’ve often mused that it must be hard to crack this employee roster since the faces have been familiar for so long.
I even wondered whether there was profit sharing or an employee stock ownership plan to retain the team. In an industry where turnover is regularly 60 percent-plus, they were an employee-retention oddity.
Ultimately I concluded that this team just enjoys working together. So I wasn’t all that surprised to find out that they’re cool with sharing the wealth by pooling their tips.
What a novel concept that in our “Eff you, I got mine” working world,a group of 15 or 20 people pulling for one another’s success allowed them to share the work and reap the rewards.
It was not unusual to see one of them serving one night, hosting the next and behind the bar on another visit. As a collective they have each others’ backs.
If one server has a table that requires a lot of attention, another server or busser covers for their colleague by doing the little things — refilling water glasses or taking an appetizer order even though it is not their table. The team attitude provides amazing customer service, solves problems on the fly and perhaps most importantly keeps the locals eager to return.
About six months ago, though, I noticed a change at the restaurant. Some of the funky artwork disappeared.
The music went from eclectic to predictable. The weekly Notorious D.O.G. rotation went static. And most notably familiar faces were gone.
I discovered that my favorite little eatery had changed ownership.
I get it. Change happens. For those of us who take comfort in the familiar, we need to adapt. That, or find another restaurant that serves tasty, encased meat.
Over the next couple of visits it was clear that other changes were underway. New staff members were inexperienced, which is understandable, but they also seemed indifferent to the legacy of customer service that built up over the years.
Since the staff was still pooling tips, it presented the risk of a breakdown in trust between engaged longtime servers and indifferent new people manifesting itself in an atmosphere of apathy. The delicate dance of having each others’ backs, which had served employees so well, threatened to descend into a clumsy series of missteps that frustrated all staff members and irritated patrons accustomed to a high level of service.
Building a cohesive staff is a challenge all managers face. Engaging and retaining them truly tests that person’s ability to manage people but also speaks volumes for employees’ willingness to set aside their own interests for the good of the organization.
Even in the best of economic times a mere one-third of employees say they are engaged in their work.
That means you have a whole lot of your workforce who at best are indifferent about their work and a big portion of them who couldn’t give a rat’s tail about you, the company’s goals or mission statement.
What can you do? You can gamble on an exodus and hope to rebuild what likely has become a demoralized staff or worse, an ugly, toxic mess.
Or, realize and appreciate the current camaraderie and learn the nuances of what sustains it through employee engagement.
Sure you are going to make changes. It’s your shop now. But too many bosses make change just for change’s sake. Can I toss out a cliché? Why fix what isn’t broken?
Sadly, I still don’t feel that old level of comfort. I’m probably not the lone patron who noticed a swing in the employee engagement.
Swapping out wall hangings, reprogramming music and curbing the fare might be one thing. But a slippage in service is noticeable, and it’s also notoriously bad for business.
From a diversity and inclusion perspective, this has been a tumultuous decade. There has clearly been an increase in conversation about moving the dial on D&I, but how much has really changed?
It’s easy to feel discouraged when women make up only 17 percent of executives in consulting, 15 percent in financial services, and 11 percent in tech. However, increased advocacy, laws and pressure addressing this problem has begun to make changes. The proportion of women on boards of the FTSE 100 has increased from 12.5 percent in 2010 to 32.4 percent in 2019.
But the numbers don’t tell the whole story. The biggest areas where things have changed are our understanding of bias and discrimination and the way people are thinking about D&I.
Ten years ago, the words “unconscious bias” were only heard in academic circles. Now, they are common parlance. The term “psychological safety” was only used in academic journals in 2010, but now C-suite executives discuss its importance. These examples show an incredible increase in our understanding of why inclusion problems persist in the workplace.
Perhaps the biggest change comes from the very reasons organizations are doing D&I work in the first place. A decade ago, most organizations were approaching D&I from a compliance-driven approach that focused on ensuring the company was meeting all requirements it was legally obligated to. This “Diversity 101” approach was about attaining a minimum, not adding value.
As social consciousness around D&I increased, many organizations moved to a “Diversity 2.0” approach. They recognized that consumer markets look very different than they might have even 10 years ago and that consumers want to respect the values of the organizations they buy from. Putting diversity at the center of a major ad campaign is a good signal to these diverse populations that businesses understand these needs.
But as we close out the decade, some organizations have realized when these ad campaigns are not backed up by concrete action, it can create a feeling of inauthenticity. This can make the dominant group feel good about themselves but make the minority group they are trying to attract even more cynical. That gap in marketing versus reality is stark, and people notice. It causes a credibility gap that can make things worse in the eyes of the public.
As a result, businesses have found real success by using the “Inclusion 3.0” approach. This is where diversity and inclusion initiatives are not something done on the side, but rather are a key aspect of the way they do business.
Inclusive thinking is embedded in all the decisions they make, creating the conditions for a more organic increase in diversity in the company and a more inclusive environment that makes everyone thrive and work together more productively.
This change in perspective is also affecting new technologies. In the last decade, advances in machine learning and AI have caused some problems in the D&I space. Algorithms are created by human programmers, so everything the machine learns is imbued with their biases. One famous example is how object-detection systems in self-driving cars are better at detecting light skin than dark skin, a phenomenon discovered by Georgia Tech researchers in early 2019.
However, this technology has also become much cheaper. Thus, as we become more aware of how bias affects AI, we are more easily able to rectify its problems. In the case of self-driving cars, companies like Tesla and Uber have been able to adapt their platforms to completely change the way their cars detect objects in a short time for a relatively low cost.
Moreover, we are seeing the advent of tech products that actually help mitigate our biases. Textio is one example. It uses machine learning to help us understand what words and phrases in job descriptions are more or less biased toward applicants of different genders.
As tech becomes cheaper and easier to use, and as our awareness of our own biases and how they affect our work and technology increases, we can become increasingly innovative in how to mitigate our biases in day-to-day life. While at times it may seem that little progress has been made when we look at the numbers, in reality the change in consciousness around D&I is a much more substantive change.
We may have backlash to this progress, coming in the forms of political crises around the globe, but the conversation has clearly changed. As such, we can look to the next decade with optimism.
One of the biggest challenges a person will face in their working lives is dealing with a bully, and unfortunately it happens to pretty much everyone. In the past, our parents told us that this was “character building” and something that “everyone has to go through,” but that’s rubbish.
The culture of the organization should never make excuses for the behavior of its managers
Denigrating the thoughts and actions of another human being has never been acceptable. However, some organizations have been great at finding excuses for it and in some instances even encouraging it.
Having to deal with poorly behaving employees is something that every culture — even those ranked as best places to work — will deal with at some stage. Often the problem with poorly behaving staff is a result of two things: the emotional intelligence of the individual and the culture that lets the person get away with behaving that way.
Managers Aren’t Necessarily Leaders
There’s an assumption that once a person achieves a particular role within a company’s hierarchy, they are automatically a leader.
Managers are good at their jobs, but leaders do that as well as motivating people by role modeling the behaviors they expect of others. This is what the great CEOs around the world do. They run the business efficiently, make good decisions, deal with issues quickly and ensure that a safe space exists for staff to be able to do their best work.
These are the kinds of people we want running our businesses. Not only are these organizations great places to work, but they’re profitable as well.
Researchers Burton and O’Reilly found this in 2000, writing, “Behavioral theories concentrate on what a leader does rather than who a person is. However, studies show that followers tend to look first at who a leader is.”
Direct Style or Bullying?
It’s important to recognize the difference between personality and behavior. Sometimes people confuse a direct management style for bullying. But other times, the CEO sets the wrong tone and is the person bullying others.
A CEO with a direct style of management doesn’t say please or thank you, will often use language that others don’t appreciate, can be blunt in the way that they provide feedback and can often makes decisions that go against the prevailing mindset. These leaders can become more emotionally intelligent, recognize how off-putting their management style can be, and adjust their style accordingly.
Bullies, however, place unreasonable demands on staff, use threatening verbal and physical language, don’t listen, are unapproachable, actively create divisions and treat people differently based on their gender, sexuality, race or skills.
People who behave in this way have no place in business, and it’s up to the people within the culture to reject this. Steve Jobs is one such example of a bully whose staff challenged him when his behaviors got the better of him.
If you’re on the receiving end of this kind of behavior from the CEO or any member of the senior management team, then it’s important to make notes about the interaction and speak with the HR manager. Their position doesn’t mean that they get to behave differently. On the contrary, they need to set the example.
It is the job of the HR manager to ensure that every member of staff upholds the behaviors and values expected. If you’re the HR manager, then you may seek to discuss your approach with your peers and jointly speak to the CEO.
Once the conversation has taken place, then you need to confirm in writing the nature of the discussion and what needs to change. This is often outlined in a process which must be followed in case follow-up action is necessary. A second conversation on behaviors must be followed by a disciplinary hearing in order to send the message that poor behavior won’t be tolerated.
The culture of the organization should never make excuses for the behavior of its managers and should deal with issues in the same way as they would for all. If the CEO doesn’t set the behavioral tone, they should be told to do so. Otherwise, the staff will suffer and so will the bottom line.
When hiring is brisk, it’s easy to rush the process and end up with mismatched employees. So it’s important to know what motivates them — not just how they behave, but why they do what they do. With today’s labor market, finding the best match for performance and retention pays for itself in retention alone.
A majority of Fortune 500 companies use assessments for selection and companies of all sizes can benefit from emulating the practice. To ensure the best talent selection and long-term match, HR should go deeper than personality types and behavior.
With assessments that determine what motivates candidates, HR can be more assured in choosing — or passing on — any individual.
“Selection is very different than just hiring,” said Brett Wells, chief science and consulting officer at Talent Plus Inc. “Selection means you’re making a sound judgement based on validity and science, based on what’s the very best in a role or an industry and how they will respond versus what you think your gut reaction should be. It’s predictive.”
It’s a Good Time to Be Choosy
“People can answer interview questions very well,” said Alison Nolan. “People are fantastic at answering interview questions, but it doesn’t always tell you the truth.”
Nolan is HR partner for the public health NGO, FHI 360. Previously, she did the same job with Volvo Group Trucks. With her 18 years of talent acquisition experience, she recommends an assessment-based hiring process.
“With an assessment, if they’re trying to fake it, it shows up,” said Nolan. “It’s very clear if they’re trying to skew the answers. If you’re honest it just gives you so much more insight. It saves the employer and the employee.”
In Nolan’s experience, only about 25 percent of employees who are put on a performance improvement process end up keeping their jobs. So why not make it a goal to avoid performance improvement interventions?
Right now, two competitive factors make it more important than ever to assess and understand employee motivation in hiring so great performance is the norm:
Near full employment. With full employment, talent acquisition is more about who you don’t hire than who you do hire, because you want to be selective and find people who will thrive in your organization. And once they’re hired, retaining those employees also becomes a competitive necessity in a tight labor market.
Career trends. People have become more selective about what jobs they take. Once upon a time, job seekers considered just getting a job a societal responsibility. Today, they are more attracted by intrinsic factors — in other words, corporate culture and corporate responsibility — than the need to simply find a steady income or a job for life.
Personality assessments that identify motivation can make all the difference in matching candidates with the jobs in your organization.
For Wells, who researches and builds assessments, carefully matched talent has never been more important for retention.
“With a tight labor market for candidates, the world is their oyster right now and ‘fit’ is key for retention,” said Wells. “If they don’t have that fit for the role or the organizational culture, they will leave. If they’re in a role where they’re not getting that intrinsic satisfaction they’re at risk for being disengaged and, again, at greater risk for leaving.”
Finding a Motivational Match
When you’ve done the work to accurately assess candidates, you can honestly say to those who aren’t a match, “You’re probably not going to like this job.”
How come?
You can answer, “Well, you’ve got the work ethic and the skills to do the job, but after a year, you’ll be exhausted because this job is all about engaging with clients daily in a strictly established corporate structure and you’re more motivated by thinking outside the box and coming up with new ways to accomplish tasks.”
On the other hand, for the candidate who assesses as a good fit, you can offer the job with assurance and negotiate as necessary to get them on board: “I really think you would love working here.”
Nolan has seen how this can be a positive experience for people who are not hired as well as the company.
“They get to hear why they didn’t get selected and they get that review,” said Nolan. “They have something tangible to walk away with. And sometimes, we say, ‘Hey we have this other position where you’d be a great fit.’ ”
You’ll know this because you’ve used a scientifically valid instrument that goes deeper than simple behavioral traits to find out things like:
Do they like to develop their own way of working or do they prefer to have it laid out for them in a prescribed manner?
Would they rather help others succeed or do they prefer monetary incentives?
Can they focus on their job with no environmental distractions or do workspace aesthetics energize them?
There are no right or wrong motivations. It’s all about congruency between what your organization needs and what it can offer the candidate.
When you assess a person’s motivation, you gain a deeper understanding of them so you can either lead them into a fulfilling and satisfying position or honestly wave them off, so they don’t take a job that will ultimately frustrate them and send them looking elsewhere.
“This is where that motivational piece comes in,” said Wells. “We often see potential wasted because they’re in roles spending time just doing things that they’re excellent at, but they don’t necessarily enjoy it.”
For Wells, it’s about talents versus strengths.
“A strength is something I’m good at, but I might not enjoy doing it, e.g., balancing a checkbook,” said Wells. “A talent is something I have the potential to do with excellence and is something I’m going to enjoy doing.”
The Perils of Using Gut Instinct
Outside of HR, not all managers are believers. Or maybe they’re just not aware.
“With some hiring managers, it can be them saying, ‘Okay, I want this person’ even when it didn’t make sense from the assessment to take that person,” said Nolan. “And nine times out of 10 they would end up on a performance improvement plan since they could not do the job, because they were not motivated by what it took to do the job.”
The best way to bring hip-shooting hiring managers into the fold of scientific talent selection is to give them the assessment that’s being used, including the feedback session. They’ll see how in-depth and revealing it is, firsthand, and they’ll be inspired by what can be achieved with a more careful hiring discipline.
Nolan has worked with managers who have a certain feeling and until they’re proven wrong — and it could be a hiring mistake that ends badly and could be costly — the task becomes how do you convince a hiring manager.
“I gave my hiring mangers the assessment and told them to take it,” said Nolan. “With them taking it, it was an eye-opener. Like someone peeking inside of you. They do it themselves and see how accurate it is.”
Why Touchy-Feely Matters
Assessments differ, but terms like “harmonious” and “altruistic” are common. This may strike old school hiring managers as a little too soft-skill or “touchy-feely” to be practical.
What does it matter if a worker cares about the number of windows and art installations in the office? Or if they’re indifferent to status and recognition?
Plenty, according to most science on the subject, but it’s also basic psychology. People function at their best when they’re at ease. If an organizational structure or a particular job aligns with motivational preferences, the employee will be more comfortable and more able to do work in a way that gives them fulfillment.
People need to be able to be themselves at work. You can fake it for a few months in a mismatched position, but not for long.
And outside-the-box thinker isn’t going to be happy if they have to support the status quo. A person who puts himself first, will burn out in a customer service job where altruistic motivation is more valued. An employee who is highly receptive to new ideas won’t fare well in a position that demands adherence to a standard process.
A motivational assessment gives you a reliable picture of what situations are best for any job candidate.
Behavior is easy to assess. If you’ve been in talent management or training for a while, you’re probably pretty good at determining a person’s way of doing things without an assessment and through good interview questions.
Motivation, however, is deeper and you’ll need a sophisticated assessment instrument to divine it.
Motivation as a metric goes back to the work of Eduard Spranger who identified six types of motivation: theoretical, utilitarian, aesthetic, social, individualistic and traditional. Today’s motivational assessments adapt this taxonomy with more workplace-specific terms.
First Step: Assess the Job
Knowing a person’s motivational make-up won’t help if you don’t know the motivational realities of your organization and the specific jobs. So, it’s important to document the chemistry of your company first.
What is the work environment like? What are the workday demands — strict office hours, telecommute, work from the field? What are the job categories? People focused? Process focused? Creative driven or analytical?
Doing this homework will allow assessments to work as talent matchmakers.
“At Volvo, we interviewed a lot of senior buyers in our purchasing group and we benchmarked what our needs are for this job,” said Nolan.
This included requirements such as working independently, working with vendors all day long, negotiating pricing, giving presentations, and being driven by metrics in working with other people.
“Once we did the interviews, we would give the assessment and it would show us how good of a match are they for the position,” said Nolan.
Wells says it’s absolutely vital to baseline the culture before assessing talent.
“In any organization there are likely pockets of success or teams that are very successful and also pockets or teams that are struggling. With a validated assessment and research process you can discern those reliable patterns, thoughts, feelings, behaviors that drive success vs. failure in those roles,” said Wells. “So, bringing those to the forefront and making them part of your selection process will help replicate that success, selection after selection, and mitigate future failures.”
Wells recommends starting with the company’s mission statement, vision statement or a competency model, then mapping out what behaviors the company rewards, ignores and punishes. And ultimately, who gets promoted.
It’s a process of defining the culture and identifying what it takes to thrive within it. Once this is known, any number of scientifically valid assessments can be used by talent professionals to dial in the optimum profile of the candidates to hire.
Finding the Right Assessment
Once an organization knows “who it is” the process of choosing an assessment can begin.
Fortunately, the assessment industry has evolved to a point where there are many accurate, reliable and powerful instruments from which to choose.
Across the board, Wells advises that there are three basic factors to always evaluate:
1) Reliability: How consistent are scores over time and across situations. If I test you today, if I test you five years from now, am I going to get roughly equivalent results?
2) Validity: How strong is this assessment result in predicting something I care about that’s going to impact my business?
3) Fairness: To what extent do individuals from protected classes perform on the assessment compared to their majority group counterparts?
Nolan has a couple of preferred assessments and both have multiscience features that include what metrics of what drives the candidate, along with a DiSC component, and have been proven over time.
It’s always been important to match employees with positions that suit their personalities. However, now it’s more of a competitive advantage than just an employee satisfaction exercise.
In the current talent market you can afford to be more selective, which will pay off in worker retention.
As younger generations redefine why we work, there’s a little more care and feeding of talent we have to accept as employers.
Matching talent with positions by motivation helps assure success on both fronts.
Flip-flops, board shorts and a tattered Rip Curl T-shirt. Perfect beach attire to be sure, but it’s not uncommon to see employees at companies with progressive — some may call them nonexistent — dress codes roll into the office as if it’s a day at the beach and not a 10-hour shift behind a keyboard.
Organizations still contemplate defining business casual dress codes.
While dress codes have substantially loosened over the past three decades, the area between appropriate and inappropriate apparel becomes a bit hazy. Fashion and personal style strategist Joseph Rosenfeld said that lax dress policies can result in employees consistently dressing down and misrepresenting themselves in a professional setting.
“What’s happened with business casual as a concept culturally is we chase to the lowest common denominator,” he said.
Business casual can be a safe bet in allowing employees to dress to their comfort levels and identities. By definition, business casual is just a step down from business professional. It is more casual, but doesn’t include jeans, and certainly bars shorts and an old high school gym T-shirt. Still, business casual can be a bit blurry too, depending on how well, or how poorly, a workplace communicates its do’s and don’ts when it comes to what to wear to work.
“More than 20 years later, I’m still trying to teach people that casual means leaving things to chance, and you don’t really want to leave things to chance when it comes to how you present yourself professionally,” Rosenfeld said.
Joseph Rosenfeld, co-founder of ModeDNA.
An OfficeTeam survey found that nearly 31 percent of office workers stated that they would prefer to be at a company with a business casual dress code; 27 percent favor a casual dress code or no dress code at all.
But there are limits to what passes as acceptable office attire. The survey also found that the most common dress code violations at work include wearing overly casual clothing and showing too much skin.
Megan Moran, founder, The Style Foundry.
“I find that companies with a strict business professional policy often deal with less dress code violations and a more consistent workforce. However, their employees end up feeling bored with their wardrobes and unable to express themselves and their personalities,” said Megan Moran, founder and wardrobe stylist at The Style Foundry. Although Moran also said that companies that implement a casual dress code policy may struggle with displaying a consistent company message and their employees may lose that empowered feeling that comes with business professional attire.
Workplaces should also avoid enforcing a dress code policy that is sexist or neglects traditional clothing among different cultures and religions. Failing to accommodate these aspects can put a company in legal trouble. According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from discriminating against individuals on account of their religion, birthplace, ancestry, culture or linguistic characteristics common to a specific ethnic group.
Amy Quarton, associate professor at Maryville University in St. Louis, said managers should ask employees for their input to help draft an appropriate dress code as this could illuminate potential concerns and legal risks as well as earn support. Quarton also said that the policy should include clear guidelines and examples of what is and is not acceptable as well as established consequences. The goal is to create a dress code policy that allows all employees to express themselves through their work attire while simultaneously represent their employer’s brand in a positive way, she said.
“New and existing employees may benefit from training programs aimed at improving their cultural competencies and understanding of stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination,” Quarton said. “Employers can also establish a process that allows employees to share their concerns about the dress code. They can then work with people on an individual basis to negotiate accommodations that work for both the employer and the employee.”
https://workforce.com/news/the-evolving-role-of-a-chief-people-officerFollowing the early November announcement that McDonald’s Chief Executive Officer Steve Easterbrook was fired after admitting to violating company policy by having a consensual relationship with an employee, Chief People Officer David Fairhurst resigned a day later.
While a company spokesman said Easterbrook’s firing and Fairhurst’s resignation are unrelated, experts contend that with such a drastic and sudden leadership change, it’s not uncommon for major shifts to occur in the C-suite.
“When the CEO leaves the company, it is very common for it to have a cascading effect. In some cases, other executives leave because they did not get the CEO job and therefore felt passed over. In other cases, they are not aligned with the new CEO and leave to pursue new opportunities,” said Dave Ramos, chief executive officer of consultancy Shiftpoints Inc., in an email. “Every executive will now have to switch their personal loyalty to Chris Kempczinski, their new CEO, or consider departing. Some of the senior executives may struggle to make this switch.”
In order to rebuild trust, Ramos said Kempczinski and the executive team must “address these issues in a humble, transparent and credible way.” The fast-food giant also stated in a press release that the “leadership transition is unrelated to the company’s operational or financial performance.”
Chicago-based McDonald’s leadership shake-up also serves as an example of how the #MeToo movement put a spotlight on the behavior of those who are in a powerful position in the workplace. Ramos said that “Easterbrook’s firing should be a red alert warning to any other executives who are violating McDonald’s no-dating policy.”
Rebecca Thornley-Gibson, a partner at law firm DMH Stallard, said that because of the amount of time colleagues spend together, it is common for personal relationships to occur. “Most of the time this won’t create issues and employers won’t interfere with the relationship,” Gibson said. “However, where there is a relationship that involves one of the individuals holding the balance of power in the workplace relationship, then conflict issues are more likely to arise.”
Gibson also said that when a relationship involves a party who is responsible for the other’s evaluations, pay reviews or promotion opportunities, then there is danger of favoritism and perceived bias. A subordinate may also feel as though they can’t say no to sexual advances from their superiors, which creates a risk of sexual harassment claims.
Relationships within the workplace aren’t illegal, but some companies implement non-fraternization policies to prevent allegations of favoritism or lawsuits stemming from unwanted advances or sexual harassment. If the situation does occur, experts say that it is best to notify a human resources director.
“Stopping relationships is not likely to be practical for employers but putting in place steps to minimize any fallout from the relationship should be considered,” said Gibson. “This will involve having in place, and communicating workplace policies on conduct at work, equality and diversity policies with a clear zero tolerance toward sexual harassment and also requiring employees to declare relationships which are likely to result in a potential conflict.”
Fairhurst had worked alongside Easterbrook for McDonald’s in the United Kingdom and was promoted to chief people officer soon after Easterbrook became CEO in 2015. No other details were provided as to why Fairhurst decided to step down when he did.
According to a Bloomberg article, Senior Vice President Mason Smoot was named as interim chief people officer.
Fairhurst announced his departure with a farewell post on LinkedIn that said although he was sad to be leaving, it was time for him to move on to his next career challenge.
These are interesting times for a professional woman in her 30s.
For many, more than a decade has been invested in a career. Rungs on the ladder climbed, reputations established. Big responsibilities in tow … heck, some of us run departments, even companies!
And that is awesome — after all, the #futureisfemale. It is also the decade where women in big cities like New York and London most commonly start having children [1a] [1b].
Gender aside, it is my opinion that jobs get more rewarding with age. The more time you spend in the workforce, the more experiences you have.
In time (assuming these experiences are relevant), they will pave the way to enhanced responsibilities, usually coupled with better role titles, bigger teams to manage, and more generous compensation. Sure, the pressure is higher, but in the eyes of an emerging executive, the benefits of climbing the corporate ladder outweigh that burden.
But this poses an interesting challenge for professional women who want children.
Imagine this. After more than a decade of hard work, a woman in her mid-30s is breaking into leadership ranks. Established and credentialed in her field, she is scaling the corporate ladder — her eye on the prize, the next promotion in sight. But she knows she wants to birth children, and that window won’t stay open forever. So that is what she does, and while she will always cherish that decision, she wonders if it will hurt her career.
It shouldn’t. But for some women it does, particularly when the right support is not in place. And this is my reason for this blog post.
I don’t suppose to have all the answers — and as a mother of two currently on maternity leave, I’m still working this out for myself. But I do have some thoughts. And, if my thoughts help even one more mother assimilate back to work when it suits her, then I’ll take it.
I took interest in this topic in 2015 when I discovered my first child was on her way. I was 32 and living with my husband in New York City. Eyeing up promotion and facing the most challenging client engagement of my career, the discovery of my pregnancy was both thrilling and terrifying.
Among the excitement were the moments when I realised the “work hard, play hard” mentality that served me through my 20s was no longer an option. After all, a pregnant woman needs her sleep. The realisation was perplexing — I needed to reframe my attitude toward work and its role in my life, and I didn’t know where to start.
I’ve made a lot of progress since then. Two babies later, I am often asked how to juggle life as both a mother and a professional. It’s the impossible question as there is no simple, let alone right answer. Alas, I attempt:
It takes a village.This African proverb is profound. For me, that village is my husband, nanny, in-laws and sister. Put simply, I could not do my job without them. A working mother must identify her villagers — they must be strong and reliable, trusted to look after the most precious of possessions. They must be thanked and appreciated, for this group is the most important coalition for a working mother’s success.
We’re in this together. There are many allies to working mothers — both men and women. But other moms in particular truly get it. We must support one another. A colleague told me she thought of asking me for a change of clothes since her baby ruined her outfit in transit to an important meeting. I wish she’d have asked — I’d have moved mountains to help. Another colleague jumped on a plane to cover for me at a moment’s notice when I was too pregnant to travel across the U.S. for a meeting. Her words when I thanked her: “We must help each other out.” I knew exactly what she meant.
Find a supportive employer. I am lucky since my firm is consistently ranked a top company for working mothers [2]. A firm that takes diversity and inclusion seriously is more likely to support a working mother’s integration than one that does not. Look for flexible work policies and family friendly benefits, as well as a leadership culture that promotes wellness and work life balance.
Divide domestic duties. As articulated by Annabel Crabb in her quarterly essay on Men At Work [3], many working mothers continue to take on the lion’s share of domestic duties in the home. In fact, research from Manchester University and the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Essex University in the U.K. has shown that working mothers with two kids score consistently higher on chronic stress indicators, such as blood pressure and hormones, as compared to the general population [4]. In order to transition back to work in a way that is sustainable and healthy, we need to see more balance in the way domestic duties are divided between family members in the home.
Set boundaries and get to work. Working mothers are expert multi-taskers, whether it’s fixing the kids’ breakfast while taking a conference call or squeezing in a doctor’s appointment between meetings, one thing is for certain and that is that working mothers have very little time. This means that what time we do have reserved for work must be used wisely. For me this has meant less procrastination. If something needs to be done, it needs to be tackled fast. It also means that there is only time for the critical items. As a fellow working mother once coached me, “You can drop the rubber balls but not the crystal one.” Identifying what really matters at work is important, and de-prioritizing the rest is a necessary action for a working mother (even if it doesn’t feel natural).
This article might feel stereotypical to some. Of course, there are women who do not want children, and there are fathers who are primary caretakers. And, obviously, women give birth to or adopt children at all ages, not just in their 30s. I’m not ignorant to that. Take my thoughts for what they are worth. As one working mother to another (or, the partner, child or colleague of a working mother), I hope these thoughts help our working mothers transition back to work with grace. After all, we’re all in this together.
P.S., This post is dedicated to my own working mother, Dr. Cathy Allen, and inspiring friends: Liz Kreuger, Caroline Gatenby, Courtney Nolan, Joanna Bates, Sarah McGrath, Emma Fletcher and Dr. Patricia Davidson. Also, the countless working mothers at PwC who inspire me every day — there are too many to name, but they know who they are.
The old-school job board model, where employers pay a website to post open positions and hope that qualified candidates will find and apply for them, may not be as flashy or talked about as some of today’s bright, shiny Generation Z gig-worker marketplace products. But since the dawning of the job board as we know it some 30 years ago they appear to remain a viable business model with plenty of life.
In 2018, online job advertising companies earned a total of $22 billion, according to Staffing Industry Analysts, an increase of 15 percent. And while many companies offer advanced services such as programmatic job advertising or social media tools, the leader in many markets “is a traditional job board that makes 70 to 80 percent of its revenue from job postings,” said Jeff Dickey-Chasins, principal of the industry consulting firm JobBoardDoctor LLC.
That doesn’t mean the industry has been complacent. Especially in markets like the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union, job boards have been exploring new revenue models, new technology and new features. They have little choice, observers say. Recruiting practices are changing, the use of data has become more sophisticated and the demands of job seekers are continually evolving.
Also, the very culture of “being online” has changed. It’s now anytime, anywhere and includes multiple channels such as websites, email, social media and chat. That dynamic can work either for or against the job boards, said NelsonHall Principal Research Analyst Nikki Edwards. Those job boards that have mobilized their platform, integrated with social media, and incorporated other channels “will have greater audience reach, and are more likely to survive, than those who do nothing to adapt or who rest on their laurels.”
It seems like a far cry from the industry’s early days, when job boards were essentially “the old newspaper classifieds,” said Gerry Crispin, founder of CareerXroads, a recruiting-technology consulting practice. “Certainly, a lot of changes have gone on, but the fact of the matter is job boards are essentially the 21st century extension of classified advertising.”
Technology Draws a Circle
Initially, online job searching was relatively simple: Candidates searched, clicked on a job and applied to it — all without ever leaving the job board. Because applicant tracking systems were just gaining traction, companies around the turn of the 21st century relied on job boards to attract candidates while job seekers used them to deliver their applications to employers. Then, as ATS technology gained traction and more organizations built their own candidate databases, job boards began serving as gateways to corporate career sites.
However, “we’ve come full circle,” said Chad Sowash, a talent acquisition consultant and host of the recruiting-focused “Chad & Cheese Podcast.” Today’s corporate career sites, he said, are often clunky and not particularly attractive.
That encourages job boards to work harder to retain traffic. Rather than charge for how long a post remains online, pay-per-click plays a larger role in their business models. That, too, incites job boards to create simple, effective user experiences.
On another level, the evolution of the ATS changed many job boards from hunter-gatherers to sourcers. “There’s always been that component where if a company wants to source candidates instead of advertise jobs, they could go and look through a résumé database,” said Dickey-Chasins. “There are now job boards whose primary focus is sourcing candidates.”
As an example, he cites Hired. Founded in 2012, Hired offers seekers free profiles designed to match them with employers looking for a particular set of skills and experiences. It then screens those profiles to match a company in, say, Chicago with developers who’ve known the programming language Ruby for 10 years and previously worked at a video game studio. “They’re essentially doing what recruiters used to do, but they do it at a lower price point and in a more automated fashion,” Dickey-Chasins said.
Hired also illustrates how creating the right experience for recruiters is as important as attracting the right candidates. “We have to make sure that we have a seamless experience for the recruiter because they can’t be going to 12 different websites to look at stuff,” Sowash said. “What we need to do is integrate those platforms into whatever your core system is — if it’s an applicant tracking system like iCIMS or a CRM like SmashFly.”
Given the sophistication of today’s data-management systems and application programming interfaces, or APIs, “there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to funnel all of these vendors into one core piece of technology,” Sowash said.
The term “job board” has become a bit of a misnomer. For instance, Indeed describes itself as an aggregator that compiles jobs from a number of sources. BioSpace, which focuses on the life sciences industry, says it’s“a digital hub for news and careers.” LinkedIn is “an online professional network.”
These and other companies offer services designed to streamline their customers’ talent acquisition process, or at least portions of it. Such features include diversity products, job-advertising packages, employer-branding packages and other features that get folded into annual subscriptions, Dickey-Chasins said. LinkedIn Group Product Manager Kevin Chuang said his company is testing a short-form skills assessment to help it uncover more accurate matches.
Rise of the Lifestyle Platforms
Among the most fundamental drivers impacting the job boards’ landscape is the ever-changing dynamics of technology products, experts say. When sites like Monster.com first appeared in the mid-1990s, not only did the ATS not exist but the mobile phone was still a large plastic brick and the internet had yet to squash America Online.
Today’s world looks a lot different: Smartphones are ubiquitous, Amazon’s Alexa looks up recipes on command and Google’s Nest manages temperatures and monitors for smoke in homes around the world. Because of this, features like convenience, ease of use, speed and mobility count toward a job board’s success more than they ever have before. In particular, improved usability has become critical as candidates — who are essentially consumers — have come to expect simpler, slicker user experiences, Sowash said.
Advancing technology also spurred the rise of what Sowash calls “lifestyle platforms” — sites like Google and Facebook that fundamentally changed the way consumers regard online communications. “As soon as we roll over in the morning, we jump into them,” he said. Job boards can’t make the same claim because consumers “aren’t looking for a job every single day of their life.”
Job boards, then, must look for ways to leverage both consumer technology and lifestyle platforms.
“If you’re a job board today, you have to realize that people aren’t waking up in the morning thinking, ‘I’ve got to go to Indeed or I have to go to whatever your brand name is,’ ” Sowash said.“They’re thinking, ‘I have to go to Google, I have to go to LinkedIn.’ ” As a result, job boards “really have to think much smarter than they ever, ever had to before.”
For the industry’s big names — like Indeed, LinkedIn and IT-focused Dice — that’s meant building suites of talent acquisition tools, facilitating messaging between candidates and recruiters and aggressively developing AI-based search mechanisms and data-visualization features. At the same time, a number of startups are at work trying to solve different talent-acquisition pain points of specific industries.
Not only that, said Chuang, but the process of job searching has become more social and thus more personal. Social networks, for example, allow candidates to connect with workers at prospective employers or ask for referrals. “The job post itself has become one step in the overarching process of the job search,” he said.
“Job boards that are still exclusively focused on job postings and a singular product versus a [fuller] solution are the ones that are really struggling right now,” said BioSpace CEO Joshua Goodwin. “They’re not experiencing the uplift that we’re seeing from this labor market because of a very simple business principle: It’s about really understanding your customer’s pain point and their end goals. Our customers are about trying to hire the right candidates and not about trying to post an individual job posting.”
The Beauty of the Niche
With that thought in mind, niche job boards like BioSpace often focus their product development efforts to align with the behaviors and habits of their audience. Sites that serve truck drivers or skilled tradespeople tend to lean heavily on mobile-first approaches along with texting and universal application models, Dickey-Chasins said. “They try to do things like text-based assessments, to fit the way these people work,” he explained. “In certain sectors it’s super hard to find people, so you basically do whatever it takes to pull those people out.”
Goodwin agrees. “We tell clients that job postings are foundational,” he said. Besides posting open positions and publicizing them, he believes effective job boards provide solutions suites that help companies proactively identify and contact candidates on platforms they might frequent.
That’s particularly important in a job market like today’s, where the candidate pool is small and the most desirable workers are often “passive,” open to opportunities but only the right opportunities. Because those candidates don’t, to paraphrase Sowash, wake up and surf to a job board, sites must think of themselves more as what Goodwin calls “recruitment web sites” that offer “a lot more than job postings.”
On his site, that “a lot more” is content. BioSpace was founded in the late 1980s as a life-sciences media firm. Today, around 700,000 unique visitors access the site each month, mostly to read domain-related content. “They want to know about what’s happening in the industry. They may not necessarily be looking at jobs,” Goodwin said. However, BioSpace’s specialized information provides employers with a launching pad from which to reach candidates.
Successful niche boards, adds John Sumser, principal analyst for HRExaminer, succeed not because of better technology but “because they understand the niche that they’re operating in and they don’t go outside of it.” The moment they attempt to expand beyond their core market, “things fall apart because their expertise is narrow.”
As the 21st century dawned, enrollment in university MBA programs was a virtual rainbow of diversity. In the early 2000s, MBA graduates were comprised of 36.2 percent people of color and 40.7 percent of grads were women, while 39.1 percent were white males.
At about the same time, chief executive roles were predominately occupied by males, most of whom were white. More than 89 percent of white men and women occupied the chief executive’s chair as of 2005, with 76 percent of those executives being male.
Considering that getting an MBA is generally a key element to a career path leading to the C-suite, the following years should have seen a succession of female and minority executives ascending to leadership roles.
That doesn’t appear to be the case, according to the research department of Human Capital Media, Workforce’s parent company, which compiled data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics annual digest. The data show that diversity in the C-suite has not kept up with MBA graduation patterns of the past two decades.
In fact, little appears to have changed since that graduating class of 2000-01. As of 2018, the most recent data available, the numbers have barely budged, with 73.1 percent of chief executives who are men and 89.5 percent who are white.
Yet mounting evidence points to diverse leadership as an economic driver. “Delivering Through Diversity,” a 2018 study by consulting firm McKinsey & Co., found that gender-diverse companies are 21 percent more likely to outperform their non-gender-diverse peers financially, and that the number for ethnic and cultural diversity is 30 percent.
A September 2019 report released by global communications company Weber Shandwick meanwhile found that when diversity is closely aligned with the overall business strategy, companies see a positive impact on reputation, employee retention and financial success. Among organizations that align their diversity strategy with their business strategy, 66 percent of diversity leaders said that D&I is an important driver of financial performance, the study found.
Even so, government data show that a diversity shortage continues to afflict executive level positions.
Author Pamela Newkirk
With research showing that the executive pipeline has been filled with diverse MBA graduates for two decades, it begs the question of where did these candidates go? And if diverse leadership indeed pushes the financial needle, as the evidence shows, then why has corporate America turned its back on this pipeline of ready-made diverse executives?
“In the 1960s, we had begun to see change. The doors were finally open to people who had historically been left out,” said Pamela Newkirk, a professor of journalism at New York University whose new book “Diversity, Inc.” takes a deep look into how workplace diversity efforts have done little to bring equality into America’s major industries and institutions.
The 1960s specifically saw efforts like affirmative action implemented to make up for the legacy of slavery and the legal discrimination that followed the end of slavery, she said. These efforts were beginning to see positive results but ultimately saw adverse responses from people who challenged affirmative action with claims of reverse discrimination.
By the 1970s, diversity numbers were barely seeing change in fields from corporate America to higher education to major media.
“Society has not been able to come to terms with ways to address this that don’t trigger the kind of backlash we’ve seen time again,” she said.
With research showing that the executive pipeline has been filled with diverse MBA graduates for two decades, it begs the question of where did these candidates go?
Rethinking the Talent Pool
Most leaders don’t know what it means to lead diversity, said Courtney Hamilton, managing director at The Miles Group, a management consulting company based in New York. Consciously or not, they may lean toward conformity and then lose the wider talent pool along the way.
Building a diverse pipeline for organizational leadership comes down to what companies are doing in hiring and promotions, she said.
Many companies try to “reverse engineer” diversity in their teams when a position opens up, she said. While it’s not bad to think about diversity when looking to hire, that is more of a reactive than a proactive strategy.
“What people miss in building a diverse pipeline and leading inclusively [is that it] needs to be front and center for organizations every single day. There is no Band-Aid. If you want that pipeline of talent, it needs to be a value and priority,” Hamilton said.
Data from Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics show that diversity in the C-suite has not kept up with MBA graduation patterns of the past two decades.
Kevin Groves, associate professor of management at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio Business School, said that many organizations fall into the trap of allowing boards or management teams to follow their intuition to pick new members of the leadership team. This intuitive judgment leads to a less diverse talent pool.
There is a way around this trap, he said: a standardized review process that is not exclusively based on the board’s judgment. This formalized talent review should be parallel to but separate from the annual performance review.
Molly Brennan, Koya Leadership Partners
It’s a tough hurdle to overcome, Groves stressed. It comes naturally to employers to believe that they know their talent best and can be reliant on their own judgment for these big decisions. This isn’t to say that the executive team should ignore their judgment completely, but the starting point for the candidate pool should be something standardized and data-driven rather than intuitive.
What’s especially helpful in diversity hiring is casting a wide net and “not assuming that when it comes to placement of key executive roles, the only place that can come from is an heir apparent,” Groves said.
Deloitte is one organization that has worked to expand its talent pool. While the professional services industry has historically looked toward a small set of specific universities to recruit from, Deloitte is making room for those schools previously overlooked like state schools and historically black colleges, said Terri Cooper, the firm’s chief inclusion officer.
Opening the search to a wider range of people allows for a more diverse group of candidates. But the benefits go beyond that, Cooper said. Looking toward the future of work, candidates with specific skills — rather than candidates with degrees from a specific school — are likely to be the right fit for a role.
It’s important to “make sure that your aperture isn’t so specific that it’s preventing the opportunity to bring that greater diversity into the fray,” Cooper said.
Diversifying the C-Suite
Rising to a C-suite position is the culmination of many experiences that start much earlier in a person’s career, like the opportunity to rise through the ranks in management positions. Such management roles are not particularly diversity-friendly.
Terri Cooper, chief inclusion officer at Deloitte
BLS data show that 60 percent of those in management positions are men versus 40 percent who are women, and 77.9 percent of those in management are white while the numbers are much smaller for black, Asian and Latinx populations. Moving to positions higher up the corporate ladder, the gap becomes wider, with a chief executive population that is only 26.9 percent women and 14.8 percent people of color.
There’s more opportunity to tackle diversity at the management level than the executive level because the population is larger and less competitive. While management positions make up 5.3 percent of the total workforce, chief executives only make up 0.1 percent, according to 2018 BLS data.
Studies show that people in underrepresented groups face many opportunity roadblocks such as fewer mentorship or sponsorship opportunities and fewer opportunities for growth within the organization, said Molly Brennan, founding partner and executive vice president of Boston-based executive search firm Koya Leadership Partners.
“This idea that there’s not a lot of qualified candidates [from] underrepresented groups out there is a false one,” she said. “There’s a whole host of diverse, qualified people who are ready, willing and able to take on leadership roles.”
Cooper said recruiting diverse talent is not the biggest challenge most organizations have. Rather, it’s advancing them within the organization to higher positions.
A key component to ensuring that talent advances is that companies must be more intentional about what an inclusive leader is and how the organization can hold leaders accountable to supporting diversity. This doesn’t mean just the most senior level of leadership but anyone who is in charge of managing people.
Deloitte relies on six components of an inclusive leader, Cooper said. They include a personal commitment to diversity, creating a work environment that allows people to identify bad behavior and being curious about others’ backgrounds and heritages.
The fundamental component here is that leaders make sure individuals can be their most authentic self at work, she said. If people are experiencing bias, it has a negative effect on their productivity, happiness, confidence and well-being, she added.
“Ultimately, if you’re experiencing that, of course you’re going to leave the organization. You’re going to look to find somewhere else where you feel you’re accepted for who you are,” she said.
There are many ways in which organizations can hold leaders accountable, Cooper said. They can set specific diversity goals for leaders and measure their success reaching those goals. They can also have leaders share specifically what initiatives they have taken to create an inclusive environment and what their recent experiences have been on mentoring or sponsoring people who don’t look, think or sound like them.
Further, other people should be able to comment on their leaders, Cooper said. Deloitte holds an expansive talent survey annually, and eight to 10 questions are specifically geared toward how inclusive of a culture they experience. Questions include: Do you feel like you’re being professionally developed? And do you feel as if you belong on your team?
Dissecting this talent data allows Deloitte to see aggregate data at a particular client site, for example, and identify the lead partner there. They can help show if this partner is truly creating an inclusive work environment for their employees.
Deloitte is careful with this data so that no one can be identified based on their answers, and the information “enables us to determine where we need to focus to move the needle,” Cooper said.
A Partnership Between D&I and Recruiting
Lee Jourdan, chief diversity officer at Chevron
Focusing on the relationship between the diversity and recruiting teams is key to Deloitte’s strategy, Cooper said. Deloitte spends a lot of time looking at available candidates and also expanding their awareness of diversity beyond gender and race. How is the company making sure that it considers talent from different socioeconomic backgrounds or neurodiverse candidates, for example.
What’s critical from the recruiters is that they’re aware of their biases, Cooper said. Her department pushed unconscious bias training for the recruiting team, and there has been positive feedback to this.
Chevron also has recruiters participate in bias training, said Lee Jourdan, the energy giant’s chief diversity officer. It’s part of the influence that employee resource groups have had on recruiting.
Such groups have been a part of Chevron for 20 years, and they work with hiring teams by helping them communicate with a broader range of candidates and lead interviews. There are 63 chapters in 12 countries, and the groups represented include women, people of different races and ethnicities, people with disabilities and those from indigenous tribes.
Through bias training and their relationship with the resource groups, recruiters work on mitigating their biases. Jourdan said they have removed the requirement that a candidate has a specific number of years of experience to get a role. This can exclude people who have not been given the opportunity in the past to gain certain experience, he added.
Employee groups have also helped the global company consider different types of diversity per region or country, Jourdan said. For example, there are three major tribes in Nigeria, and people may be marginalized if they are not a part of one of these tribes, he said. Chevron’s diversity efforts there could partly be geared toward this group.
Making Diversity a Business Imperative
At executive search firm Koya, which mostly recruits for leadership positions at nonprofits, clients increasingly are expecting and requiring a diverse pool of talent, Brennan said. Their focus on making diversity a priority has seen promising results. Forty percent of its placed candidates are people of color, she said.
This number is much higher than the general leadership population. Brennan believes this is because they purposely and consciously set out to make this number high. It’s both what the client and the search firm want.
Aspirational diversity goals help Chevron continually create a more even playing field, Jourdan said. Rather than having specific diversity targets for individuals of underrepresented groups, he believes that aspirational numbers, whether or not they are reached in a given year, help the organization take on certain behaviors and move in a positive direction.
One place to look for these aspirational numbers is the demographics of individuals graduating from business school, Jourdan said.
“We believe that [diversity targets] drive the wrong behavior. We’re vocal about the fact that we don’t do those,” Jourdan said. Rather, he said that Chevron holds leaders accountable to move toward improving numbers to achieve the aspirational goals.
Most importantly, it takes leadership and intention for diversity to work, author Newkirk said.
She stressed something that Columbia University President Lee Bollinger said in an interview for her book. There must be a sense of justice, especially given the history of slavery and discrimination in the U.S.
“This is also an issue of justice. Without that mindset many diversity initiatives won’t really work,” Newkirk said.
For example, our research found that women who work remotely were twice as likely to report proactively leveraging HR to resolve issues, when compared with in-office women. This gap did not exist between in-office men and remote men. Meanwhile, women who work from home were also more likely to feel confident that HR understands their needs and concerns — 67 percent agree or strongly agree that HR is aware of their needs, versus 57 percent of in-office women. Men tended to be even more confident — 73 percent of in-office and 72 percent of remote male workers agree or strongly agree.
When hiring is brisk, it’s easy to rush the process and end up with mismatched employees. So it’s important to know what motivates them — not just how they behave, but why they do what they do. With today’s labor market, finding the best match for performance and retention pays for itself in retention alone.
That encourages job boards to work harder to retain traffic. Rather than charge for how long a post remains online, pay-per-click plays a larger role in their business models. That, too, incites job boards to create simple, effective user experiences.
