Category: Workplace Culture

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Building a Community in Your Workplace

Andie Burjek, Working Well blog

The Health Enhancement Research Organization recently released a report listing 24 key elements employers can use to create a healthy workplace culture. Many them sound like what my sources often tell me, and a few of them stuck out to me, notably having a “sense of community.”

Taking a step back, I recently started attending a yoga studio near my new apartment as a way to pass the time. It’s $30 for two weeks of unlimited classes, sure, why not? The first thing that stuck out to me was a poster on the studio wall. “How to Build a Community” it read in big bold letters. Forming a community-based habit was one reason I joined these classes, after all. The studio is walking distance from my apartment and my grocery store is on the walk back from class.

Feeling a part of a community isn’t a passive accomplishment. It’s something to search for. One friend pursued her dad’s Lutheran church after years of going to services at a different domination. Another joined a tap dance crew. It takes energy, time and true interest. Some people need it to feel satisfied; others don’t need it at all. It’s very personal.

The poster listed an array of ways to start building a community, including, “Turn off the TV,” “Leave your apartment,” “Ask a question,” “Support neighborhood schools,” “Sit on your stoop” and more suggestions. Reading it got me thinking how one could incorporate these community-building tips in workplace wellness.

A sense of community, at least on a small scale, is common in most workplaces, according to Dan Krick, a member of the HERO Culture of Health Study Committee and the vice president of organizational development at Hexagon Lincoln. A healthy sense of community can lead to many positive outcomes, like higher work performance, lower turnover and a stronger acceptance of company initiatives such as wellness, quality or safety, he added.

For organizations interested in creating a sense of community, Krick suggested a valuable starting point: ask why. Why do you want to create a sense of community? “It may sound silly, but companies that do this well will typically form a strong sense of community because it ties directly to their purpose or values of their organization,” he said.

Once you’ve addressed why, he suggests that companies “hard-wire” programs and practices that support a community. For example, in the onboarding process a company could discover people’s interests and make immediate connects based on what people have in common. “The biggest catalyst for building a strong sense of community is creating forums for people to connect,” Krick said. “That can be social media, and good old-fashioned events that bring people together for discovery of interests and matching of values.”

Meanwhile, that poster gave me a few ideas that I believe fit into workplace wellness. Turn off the TV? Translation: Employees, it’s OK to put your computer on sleep mode. Leave your apartment? That could mean get out of your cube when you can. Maybe that means taking a walk at lunch. Maybe that means that attending conferences, classes or networking events outside of work to help you develop yourself.

Maybe the workplace will be the community employees turn to for staying healthy and connecting with other people. Great! Maybe other people rely on a different community for that, and that should be acceptable, too.

Another one of these 24 elements that help create a healthy workplace intrigued me as well: recruitment and selection. My first thoughts upon reading this: If you only recruit and select people who fit into your culture of health, are you discriminating against people with health issues or against people who simply wouldn’t have interest in joining a workplace wellness program for whatever reason?

It also brought to mind a colleague’s article titled, “The Pros and Cons of Hiring for Cultural Fit.” It’s a timely topic that dives into the recruiting and hiring process and explains the complexity of hiring someone because they’d fit in your culture.

That being said, I asked Krick for an explanation. He said he prefers the word “selection” over “hiring” because it’s more intentional. “With every selection a company is adding or detracting to its culture, so ultimately adding or detracting to every result area — revenue, profits, safety, culture, wellness, you name it,” he said. He added that the right selection decision is important for both the individual and the company, and that companies owe it to the candidate to we accurately illustrate what kind of organization they might be joining.

“We actually do an injustice to the person being recruited if we select them into a strong culture of well-being when they have a value system that does not align,” he said. “I don’t view that as discriminatory, but rather as respecting that individual enough to not put them in a culture that will not fit them.”

Andie Burjek is a Workforce associate editor. You can find Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews and Andie at @andie_burjek. Comment below or email editors.workforce.com.

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5 Proven Strategies to Guarantee Your Diversity Initiative Produces Results

Intent does not equal impact. Time and again I see organizations with good intentions embark on an enthusiastic endeavor to increase diversity in their workplace.

Time and time again I also see their nonexistent to negative impacts, from failure to create lasting positive change to crash-and-burn disasters rife with unproductive conflict. Often it’s because they didn’t follow one or more of these five proven strategies for diversity and inclusion success – the “new school” way. The good news is it’s never too late to learn and regroup, and a new year presents ripe opportunity for fresh starts!

Strategy No. 5: Hire an Excellent Training Partner. If you’ve invested lots of money in training but seen low to no meaningful results, or you’ve received feedback that D&I training has led to confusion or increased problems, you may have selected a training partner that was inadequate, or not a good fit for your organization’s culture. Not all diversity training or trainers are high quality, especially now that D&I is more common and sought-after than ever before. Engaging an inadequate training partner wastes scarce resources, and undermines the credibility of D&I efforts. Ensure you’re set up for success before making a game-changing investment by asking: (1) Do we need training? Sometimes leadership coaching, systems change, or data collection is a more appropriate intervention, and a true D&I professional will help you figure this out. (2) Do we need it now? Training usually yields a higher ROI after proper assessment or other interventions. (3) Who do we already have internally with expertise in organizational development, adult learning, instructional design and facilitation? Ask potential internal and external training partners strategic questions to determine expertise and fit.

diversity and inclusionStrategy No. 4: Measure the Meaningful Impact of Training … and Reinforce It. If your D&I training got rave reviews, but you’ve seen no-to-low meaningful outcomes in your culture, systems, or leadership, you may not have set training up for success back in the workplace. Not creating a robust plan for implementation and systems change following D&I training wastes resources. It’s a false belief, even among some training professionals, that the effects of training can’t be measured. This belief undermines the credibility of D&I, and reflects poor stewardship of an organization’s trust and investment of budget, time and talent. Before investing in training, ensure you’re set up for success by asking: (1) What are the specific goals or learning objectives for the training? (2) What is our baseline? In other words, where are we now in relation to our training goals? (3) How will we know whether this training was a success? What metrics will we track, and how will we measure it?

Strategy No. 3: Identify and Measure Meaningful Goals. If you don’t have D&I goals, or your goals are only to start employee resource groups or recruit/hire/promote more people of color or women, stop what you’re doing and focus here. Launching D&I efforts with no clear goals, or old-school goals that are limited to focusing on numbers devoid of meaningful strategy is the best way to ensure D&I stalls, fizzles or disappears. You can’t produce meaningful, measurable business-critical results without meaningful goals, and if you’re not producing meaningful, measurable results, you’re wasting time and money. Meaningful D&I goals address a current, pressing problem or take your organization from good to great. Tackling D&I without them adds tasks and stress to leaders’ and employees’ already-overflowing plates (thus reducing buy-in), and damages the credibility of D&I efforts.

Approaching your D&I initiative like a checklist of best practices from elsewhere without a solid business imperative that’s relevant and urgent to your organization’s success is just as ineffective as approaching any other strategic priority that way. Your goals, challenges and needs may not be the same as your competitors’, or the rest of your industry. You must do adequate assessment and gap analysis before taking action to get better-than-OK results. Start by asking: (1) How will a successful D&I initiative alleviate our existing pain points? (2) How will a successful D&I initiative move us from good to great in critical areas we already care about? (3) How will a successful D&I initiative help us avoid potential future pain points?

Strategy #2: Address Your Culture’s Toxicity to Excellence, Change and Inclusiveness. If you have meaningful, business-critical D&I goals, but you’re seeing low to no desired change or experiencing poor employee engagement, your organization may be too toxic for D&I to take healthy root. Also, if you don’t assess employee engagement in any formal, consistent way, haven’t reviewed your data for over three years or don’t cut your (engagement, turnover, promotion, hiring) data by strategic demographic groups, you’re flying blind. Your training program will fall flat and your investment is wasted if your culture doesn’t support healthy change, equity, inclusion or general excellence. Your core issue might not be about diversity and inclusiveness at all, but rather lack of accountability or effective leadership, which are creating or exacerbating diversity issues

Strategy #1: “Do Diversity” for the Results (Not Just Because It’s the Right Thing to Do). “Rightness and “goodness” are beliefs based on certain values. One’s beliefs and values may be precious but they aren’t facts or universal truth. They may not provide value, results or profit, which are important to organizations. Also, not everyone shares the same values. Expecting that everyone does is naïve, and believing everyone should actually reduces diversity and silences those who challenge or raise questions. Doing diversity based on notions of rightness is also unsustainable, because initiatives based only on beliefs and values are often viewed as nice-to-haves that get cut when leadership priorities shift, or resources become scarce. Believing that doing diversity is right or good isn’t required for it to work. Just as one doesn’t need to believe in internal combustion or the laws of physics to drive a car, the principles of diversity and inclusiveness work regardless of the belief systems of those involved.

Diversity plus inclusiveness gets superior results, as shown by multiple studies including from hard sciences like mathematics and economics. Doing diversity right isn’t about helping “them” (women, people of color, LGBT, people with disabilities, etc.). It’s not about doing the right thing, making others think you’re good people or keeping up with your competitors. Doing diversity right is about getting superior results in whatever critical, strategic priorities you already have. It’s about solving an urgent problem or going from good to great. That’s it. Diversity plus inclusiveness is an excellence multiplier. Don’t treat it as anything less by not implementing these five proven strategies to produce results that matter!

Susana Rinderle is president of Susana Rinderle Consulting and a trainer, coach, speaker, author and diversity & inclusion expert. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

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Chief Diversity Officer: One of the Hardest Jobs in Technology

diversity, gender

Imagine a job whose requirements not only rely on improving product and increasing financial success, but also span across hiring and influencing corporate culture.

While a chief diversity officer might not be the first job that comes to mind, it plays an increasingly crucial role in company output and financial success. According to a 2015 McKinsey report on 366 public companies, those that ranked in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean than those who were less diverse.

Not only are chief diversity officers the gatekeepers to ensuring a diverse and inclusive workplace but we play an integral role in helping cultivate teams that produce better products, resulting in greater financial success.

The Opportunities Are Boundless

For many years, chief diversity officers have:

  • Partnered with talent acquisition to reimagine how we recruit and interview.
  • Ensured diverse composition of teams to create the best products and services.
  • Required inclusive behaviors as essential management skills.
  • Influenced community philanthropy to have impact on diverse communities.
  • Ensured that companies have diverse suppliers.
  • Worked with human resources to develop a diverse pipeline of leaders.

In some of the more advanced organizations, you see chief diversity officers:

  • Teaming with customers to advance diversity on a national and global basis.
  • Supporting organizations that champion women, ethnic minorities and other underrepresented groups.
  • Collaborating with marketing to ensure diverse populations are addressed both from a customer perspective and from an industry perspective.
  • Collaborating with product development to ensure that diversity is considered in how products are made.
  • Influencing artificial intelligence to ensure the use of diverse data sets that are diverse at the beginning of AI development.

The role is much more comprehensive than most people would ever consider and touches all parts of the business. I have worked in diversity and inclusion for more than 20 years, all the way back to when the very thought of a role dedicated to this topic was a new idea.

The role of chief diversity officer means different things depending on the company’s priorities and goals.

Reason for the Role

If you have more than 1,000 employees at your company, odds are you probably have someone in charge of diversity. And those roles are only going to increase as diversity continues to be top of mind in business. Most companies create this role because there is some desire to have either more women or underrepresented ethnic groups in the workforce. Sometimes that desire is genuine, and sometimes there is feeling that an organization has to do something since everyone else is.

The role provides a unique opportunity to transform the composition of the workforce. Many organizations now recognize the value diversity brings and are prioritizing it. Because we are often not functionally responsible for sourcing candidates, interviewing them or hiring them, we are influencing colleagues in talent acquisition to consider candidates that they had not before.

This is where the question, “Are we lowering the bar?” is inevitably raised, implying that by changing where we recruit, we may bring in candidates who are less qualified. It is at this point our role becomes essential to underline the value of expanding the pools from which we recruit, while challenging prejudices, stigmas, stereotypes and beliefs.

How the CDO Has Evolved

In addition to influencing change internally, we are now leading commentary outside of our companies on change across the country, and even the globe, when it comes to race, sex and class in the news. In the past year alone, chief diversity officers have risen to the challenge of company spokesperson or even been asked to act. From the Black Lives Matter movement to gender-pay equality, anti-immigration orders to the white supremacist demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia, Brexit and beyond. We are now the champions of the importance of diversity in the workplace and having a platform to encourage change in the face of these events is quite a shift.

Essential Skills

Many people, including many of my colleagues, believe that passion for diversity is the main criteria for this role. It is much more than that. The hardest skill to master is to be committed to the role and results while being detached from each day-to-day experience. Much of our work is facilitating those who are ambivalent — and I emphasize facilitate, not change.

We can create conditions for people to move along their diversity journey, but they need to come along willingly and when the moment is right for them. As a chief diversity officer, every discussion that we have is its own mini-diversity workshop. People are leaving with both an impression of you and of your organization’s diversity and inclusion efforts.

In my role, I have encountered many people who were extremely resistant to diversity at first but after going through the process, became some of our biggest supporters. It requires patience, perspective and being personally centered — in other words, being committed to creating diversity and inclusion, but detached from each individual’s willingness to participate at any given moment.

Battling Misconceptions

There are many articles and opinions about the value of diversity training. I have always maintained that diversity training has value if there are corresponding practices, procedures and policies in the workplace to support someone once they return from the training.

When diversity training has been considered unsuccessful, typically it has been conducted in a vacuum with no support in the workplace. If a company is instituting Six Sigma, they will not only engage in training, but change performance reviews, reward systems, management systems and have large-scale communications of expectations.

If people expect diversity training to have similar impact, they need to be administered with the same level of support and championing as anything an organization takes seriously. When we conduct diversity training at my company, Autodesk, for a group, we make sure that they are in a certain state of readiness and that this training is part of an overall diversity plan rather than a stand-alone activity.

The role of chief diversity officer is complex and challenging, but also offers immense opportunity to create change — from who we hire to the technology we create.

Daniel Guillory is the head of global diversity & inclusion at Autodesk, a San Rafael, California-based 3D design and engineering software company.

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Good Leaders Can Redefine Training to Help Transform Workplace Culture

Only a handful of children will make a varsity team without an involved cheerleader in their lives spurring them on and driving accountability. You’ll likely never see a child make it to the Olympics without a parental figure taking an active role in their training.

training and development by good leaders
An employee’s perception of their company’s culture is directly connected to how engaged their direct manager is in their training.

The same is true of employees. Gallup says that 70 percent of employee engagement is due to the “manager effect.” An employee’s perception of their company’s culture is directly connected to how engaged their direct manager is in their training.

The best training companies feel strongly about assertive, supportive coaches walking alongside employees to unleash human performance in order to redefine training, transform culture and change lives.

The New England Patriots pulled off one of the all-time great comebacks in sport when they turned a 28-3 second-half deficit into a 34-28 overtime win in the 2017 Super Bowl. Some teams might’ve mentally given up trailing by 25 points with less than 20 minutes to play, but the Patriots focused on what they’d done well to that point and tried to amplify that message on the sideline.

Instead of getting down on themselves, they realized that the offense was producing a lot of yards but was misfiring on a few key plays. They focused on those positive behaviors and kept morale up on the sideline by constantly harping on empowering themselves to acknowledge the big successes and fix the small things. As a result, they felt equipped to succeed because they weren’t browbeaten by their failures.

The Patriots’ positive mentality won them the ultimate prize at the end of the day. A proactive training company can equip leadership with these kinds of tools.

Modeling Behaviors

Wealthy people have a habit of learning from other wealthy people. Warren Cassell Jr. is a 15-year-old entrepreneur and published author. He achieved success in such a short time by studying the wealthiest people who ever lived, and executing what they did.

Are the internal and external trainers in your company following what the best do? Are they people who’ve achieved high levels of success, even when the market and circumstances were against them?

A vice president of sales called me and said she was recently looking at different training options for her sales team. I discovered that a few years ago her company hired a sales trainer, and after a year of training she’d seen no real change within her team.

The trainer they hired had been a sales professional and won several awards, but she’d never sold in her team’s tough Midwest market. The trainer couldn’t relate to the down market or overcome the objections sales professionals received. The trainer hadn’t been forced to follow the processes of the truly great sales professionals, so he didn’t. Modeling the right behaviors and beliefs is paramount to success and a key driver to a training company that can change your paradigm.

You’ve heard a strong team is only as successful as its weakest link, but putting that ideology into practice with tangible steps is key to a healthy workplace. And one way to assure the pace never slackens is pairing struggling employees with high-performing leaders to squeeze the most out of their performance.

In their bestselling book “Extreme Ownership,” retired Navy SEALs Leif Babin and Jocko Willink write about the importance of accountability and how it can open leaders and employees alike up to new plateaus of success. In one story, Babin tells of an occasion during SEALs Hell Week when the trainees were split into teams for boat races.

Babin noticed Team 2 won every race, while Team 6 consistently finished last. Team 6 constantly fought amongst itself, playing the blame game and complaining about anything and everything. To fix the problem, the training instructor switched the leaders between the two teams, and Team 6 won the very next race. A motivating leader is invaluable, and a training company should provide ways for your management to have a Team 2 mentality.

Traveling a Different Path

When Glenn Kelman took over as CEO at online brokerage firm Redfin in 2006, the disruption the company’s vision caused the home-buying industry took its toll. While Redfin succeeded in its mission to essentially refund buyers 66 percent of the traditional 6 percent fee real estate agents usually charge, selling agents fought back by blacklisting Redfin and refusing to sell to its agents for undercutting their typical profit.

Kelman’s initial reaction was to hide behind shame, but Redfin quickly pivoted to the offensive. They began using their blog to offer self-deprecating critiques on the industry as well as Redfin’s own business practices, and Kelman even used it to mock himself.

This made some in the industry nervous, but the public loved the transparency and vulnerability, and in 2016, 10 years later, Redfin posted $200 million in revenue. Employees and clients alike love it when companies acknowledge and own their whole journey, warts and all.

Jason Forrest is CEO and chief culture officer at Forrest Performance Group. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

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Workplace Oasis Time: A Q&A with Marilyn Paul

leave management, PTO, vacation, PTO

Marilyn Paul’s best time in her week is spent with her family. These moments help the author and consultant succeed at living her truth — practicing a Sabbath, as she calls it, every week to rejuvenate from overworking, busy schedules and stress.

Marilyn Paul, author of “An Oasis in Time: How a Day of Rest Can Save Your Life."
Marilyn Paul, author of “An Oasis in Time: How a Day of Rest Can Save Your Life”

Her latest book, “An Oasis in Time: How a Day of Rest Can Save Your Life,” focuses on the positives of taking a day a week as an oasis of rest from work. Workforce intern Ariel Parrella-Aureli spoke to Paul about the work benefits of taking breaks and her advice for employers and HR leaders to help employees find their “oasis time” in a culture that demands working excess hours.

Workforce: Where does the idea to constantly work come from?

Marilyn Paul: We have become used to being consumers and producers. If you combine the inventive, innovative streak with the marketing and producing element and you add that into the competitive way to get ahead and do, do, do, you have what we are in — you throw in digital tech and we are overwhelmed. Even 2,500 years ago, as this notion of a Sabbath came into being, there was a need to stop the everyday and turn toward something else — if it’s awe, purpose, or if religious and feel themselves turning toward God; we need time for that.

WF: What’s the challenge here for HR practitioners?

Paul: The question for a lot of HR people whom I’ve worked with is how do you start the conversation in your workplace so that people come around to the idea that frequent breaks, staying off email on the weekend, all contribute to increased productivity? Part of the challenge is to shift the norms of your workplace so people really grasp what good rest is. If they are resting, they are not scrolling through their Twitter feed; they are going out for a walk, practicing yoga or having a healthy snack.

WF: What advice do you give to people always working? 

Paul: It is counter-cultural but what we all need to do is look for examples of people who know how to rest well, and that doesn’t mean they are flying to Hawaii to the beach. We use busy as a badge of honor. If we are busy it means we are important. If we are running ourselves in the ground it means we are valiant. What I want to help do is change that to say we are not going to squeeze in our rest and our reflection; we are going to embrace ample playtime because that is what makes life worthwhile. There are people all around us who understand the value of this oasis time. We have to find each other and help each other off the clock and off the hook.

Ariel Parrella-Aureli is a Workforce intern. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

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Bullying Continues to Be a Pervasive Threat in the Workplace

workplace bullying
Workplace bullying remains pervasive despite educational efforts.

The Workplace Bullying Institute defines workplace bullying as “repeated, health-harming mistreatment of one or more persons (the targets) by one or more perpetrators. It is abusive conduct that is threatening, humiliating, or intimidating, or work interference (sabotage) which prevents work from getting done, or verbal abuse.”

One published report stated that most of the time when bullying occurs in the workplace the bullies are attacking the employee who is the strongest asset of the company. A decade ago a study done by Judy Blando from University of Phoenix revealed showed that 75 percent of employees said they had been affected by workplace bullying. Ten years later another bullying study, this one by CareerBuilder surveying LGBT workers, indicated that four out of 10 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender workers report feeling bullied.

American businesses don’t understand the severity of workplace bullying, said Gary Namie, a social psychologist and director of the Workplace Bullying Institute.

“American business doesn’t see it as a negative when they testify against our proposed legislation. They basically say don’t interfere with our right to manage people as we need to,” Namie said. “Now what that says is they believe American employers believe abusive conduct is an essential part of organizational life, and it is, it’s pretty common.”

LGBT employees report some of the highest percentages when it comes to being bullied at work, the study noted. Two out of five LGBT employees report that they feel bullied at work. Some 56 percent of bullied LGBT workers report being bullied repeatedly.


Female employees are 66 percent of the targets when it comes to workplace bullying, according to the 2017 National Survey by the Workplace Bullying Institute.

Namie explained how workplace bullying training adds little value to preventing bullying.

“The way that the state agencies are handling the mandated training is basically an illustration or two of bullying, and all that’s doing is teaching people how to bully,” Namie said.

The way employees are trained on bullying and the punishment for such actions is not working, according to Namie. Bullying is allowed to thrive at work.

“The key to breaking bullying is reinforcement. The reinforcement that bullying gets, the positive reinforcement is what sustains it,” Namie said. “In other words change the bullying into trouble for the perpetrator instead of trouble for complainants. Complainants are petrified to complain because just like sexual harassment, there’s fear of retaliation.”

Namie continued to explain how workplace bullying can be solved and stopped, there just have to be laws put in place for it. Currently Tennessee, Utah and California are the only states with laws passed stating that workplace bullying is illegal, according to Labor and Employment Law Counsel. Considering just three states have regulations in place it follows that many workplaces don’t take bullying as a serious issue since most states do not have these laws.

Namie said that bullying has proven to be everywhere, even places that are supposed to be safe areas like the workplace.

There are solutions that employers can bring into their workplace. Enforcing policies is the main step.

“The full comprehensive solution is you have to have the policy, you educate, then you faithfully enforce it at all levels,” Namie said. “Then you integrate the values in the policy in your performance appraisal so that we can stop saying to people, such as professors and physicians, ‘I know he’s cruel but he’s brilliant.’ Cut out the brilliant, there are brilliant people who are also kind.”

Alexis Carpello is a Workforce intern. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

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How Do We Start to STOP Sexual Harassment?

Jon Hyman The Practical Employer

Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Louis CK, Mark Halperin, Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes … the list of men accused of sexual harassment and other sexual misconduct seems to know no end.

I very much hope that we have reached the beginning of a cultural watershed against sexual harassment in America. Which is undoubtedly a good thing, especially when you consider a recent Washington Post survey reporting that nearly one-third of women have received an unwanted sexual advance from a co-worker.

All of which begs the question … if sexual harassment is so prevalent in the American workplace, how do we start having a conversation about how to stop it?
Thankfully, the EEOC has some answers. Or at least the beginning of some answers.

Last year, the EEOC spearheaded a Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace, headed by Commissioners Chai Feldblum and (current acting EEOC Chair) Victoria Lipnic. That task force published an 88-page report [pdf] on harassment in the workplace. That report, in turn, generated Proposed Enforcement Guidance on Unlawful Workplace Harassment [pdf], the final publication of which is imminent, and could not be more timely.

The comprehensive draft report covers all aspects of workplace harassment law, but it’s its last seven pages—entitled, Promising Practices—that are of particular interest in light of the recent spate of harassment allegations.

It offers five core principles that have generally proven effective in preventing and addressing workplace harassment:

  • Committed and engaged leadership
  • Consistent and demonstrated accountability
  • Strong and comprehensive harassment policies
  • Trusted and accessible complaint procedures
  • Regular, interactive training tailored to the audience and the organization
What do these principles look like in the real world? Rather than offer my own thoughts, I’d like to quote those of Commissioner Feldblum, from her prepared written testimony presented during the EEOC’s June 2016 Public Meeting on Proposed Reboot of Harassment Prevention Efforts, in discussing two key components of any successful harassment prevention protocol:

First: actions to prevent harassment must start from the top. Leaders of an organization—private or non-profit, large or small—must communicate a sense of urgency about preventing workplace harassment. They must communicate this through words, policies and procedures that create a culture in which harassment is not tolerated.
But that is not enough. For workers to believe their leaders are authentic—that they mean what they say—there must be accountability.

This is what accountability looks like: If an individual has engaged in harassment, that individual is sanctioned in a manner proportionate to the harassing conduct. For managers and front-line supervisors, it means that such individuals are measured by how well they deal with reports or observations of harassment, including receiving accolades when they deal with such situations well. …

I will conclude with … our most audacious, recommendation: that EEOC explore the launch of an “It’s On Us” campaign for the workplace. …

It is a campaign that encourages every person to become an engaged bystander…. To succeed, such a campaign would need the active engagement of many societal actors—including, at a minimum, employers, employees, unions, advocacy groups and community leaders. What we propose is that EEOC be a catalyst in helping to launch such a campaign.

And it’s the last point that is perhaps the most important. It is on all of us, men and women, to stop workplace harassment. When you see something, say something. It’s no longer OK to ignore harassment, to say, “Oh, that’s just good ol’ Ted. Can’t keep his hands to himself.”

“Good ol’ Ted” is a sexual predator, who has no place working at your business if he can’t keep his hands, or his inappropriate comments, to himself. When all employees of both genders understand (and maybe not until all employees understand) each’s role as key cog in creating a workplace culture where it’s not only acceptable to complain, but it’s expected that one will complain, we can begin to create the workplace where unlawful harassment is a relic of history.

To put it differently, if you’re not stopping harassment, you’re complicit in it, and that must stop.

Jon Hyman is a partner at Meyers, Roman, Friedberg & Lewis in Cleveland. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Hyman’s blog at Workforce.com/PracticalEmployer.

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Webasto: Optimas 2017 General Excellence Winner

From left: Kristy Lake, Sylvia Blair, Anne Boone, Corey Stowell, Philipp Schramm, Alisha Easterling, Charles Braxton, Tamala Meyers, Liz Beatty, John Wilder and Andre Schoenekaes.

The Great Recession hit Detroit and the auto industry hard. The federal government bailed out General Motors and Fiat Chrysler Automotive as sales took a huge hit.

Webasto Roof Systems Americas, a Rochester Hills, Michigan-based automotive supply company, was not immune to the fallout. But unlike the automakers’ relatively quick turnaround, financial and cultural aftershocks of the economic decline lingered at Webasto, the North American division of Germany-based Webasto Group.

“There was so much fear in the organization to be let go. It was unbelievable,” said Philipp Schramm, chief financial officer and vice president of human resources and IT at Webasto. “The industry around us, too, was not so good, like it is now. A lot of people were very worried. If you talked to someone on a Friday, people almost came into your office saying, ‘Do you want to let me go?’ ”

Read about the rest of our 2017 Optimas winners here

In the face of financial difficulties as well as a demoralized workforce, the company had a choice. When both the financial and cultural health of the company is failing, which should it focus on first? The simpler, more direct route was to close plants and lay off employees. Instead Webasto took an unconventional and more long-term approach to financial improvement by first resuscitating its failing culture.

In 2015 Webasto’s corporate culture was ranked among the “worst ever seen” by management consulting company McKinsey & Co. in their “Organizational Health Index.” Schramm, who at the time oversaw just finances, took over the HR role and inherited the sickly culture.

Departments didn’t communicate with each other, he said. They were focused on their own objectives rather than the broader and bigger goals of the organization. Putting out fires was more important than doing things right in the first place, which took a financial toll on the company. The support functions themselves were siloed and flawed, and that spilled out onto the plant floors and other parts of the organization.

“[A dysfunctional main organization] will lead, in every arm of the organization, to the same dysfunctional results,” Schramm said.

Webasto’s solution to building a new culture was separated into several phases. First, the company identified a road map of desired behaviors by asking every employee what their cultural priorities were. The guide, called “Our Compass,” was to be incorporated into the organization’s core values because it inherently included the cultural needs of all employees. Then, Webasto set out to create an environment that encouraged listening.

Meetings known as listening sessions resulted in crucial insights, Schramm said. A colleague, rather than a manager or executive, was trained to facilitate small-group discussions. This person would start a discussion among a large group of employees with a question like, “What are your hopes and fears at Webasto?”

A lot of valuable information came out of these discussions because the facilitator didn’t interrupt or comment on the discussion but instead let people talk. For example, an employee didn’t know a bereavement policy was in place, Schramm said. Because it was a listening session, the goal wasn’t about correcting the employee’s misunderstanding about available benefits but to listen and learn.

“It’s not on the colleague because he didn’t understand it,” Schramm said. “If he feels that way, then it’s our job as a management team to fix this and make it so clear that everyone in the organization understands it.”

The company also had to overcome employee distrust. Many colleagues had been with the company for almost 30 years. “What they’ve shared with me is, ‘I’ve seen so much already. It’s just another flavor of the month,’ ” Schramm said. They didn’t want to invest themselves in the process only to be disappointed.

Schramm relied on transparency to combat the dispirited attitude.

“I cannot ensure you this will work out,” he told employees. “But everything I can do and what I can influence I will do to drive this to success.”

The culture change project, which spanned from January 2015 to November 2016, provided positive results in a short period of time. Webasto did a re-survey with McKinsey’s OHI again in 2016 and came out with a score 18 points higher than before, the largest improvement McKinsey had seen in a 15-month period.

It also saw a drop in voluntary employee turnover. And, after being in a grim financial situation in 2014, Webasto’s U.S. operations returned to profitability by mid-2016.

Initiatives from the project continue today, and in November 2016 Webasto hosted and funded a three-day event called the Strategic Planning Summit in Detroit to discuss its past problems, celebrate its current successes and plan for the future.

“The summit was another advancement in Webasto’s way of listening to colleagues and engaging them in developing solutions to sustain momentum every day,” wrote Gwen Knapp, communications manager at Webasto Roof Systems Americas, in the company’s Optimas application.

Participants at the summit developed 20 ideas to improve business performance, Knapp said. Today there is a team responsible for helping advance implementation on these plans.

“Pushing the organization to achieve operational excellence without layoffs led to dramatic improvements both to culture and the bottom line,” she added.

Schramm likened Webasto’s renaissance to Detroit’s gradual improvement, which emerged from the Great Recession as a “broken city” and has slowly emerged as a city on the mend.

“We have evolved from the lessons learned from these hard times when we hit rock bottom, and came back up,” Schramm said.

For its workplace initiative, which demonstrates excellence in the Optimas categories of Business Impact, Managing Change, Innovation, Vision, Training, and Benefits, Webasto Roof Systems Americas is the 2017 Optimas Award winner for General Excellence.

Andie Burjek is a Workforce associate editor. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.