Events

DEIB Tech: Its Time Has Come

Global pandemic. Protests. Elections. Riots. (And whatever else happens between when we publish this article and you read it.) Needless to say, the last year has been rough. It laid bare our differences in stark relief. Shown how events impact diverse people differently. Perhaps it caused you some measure of disgust, despair, or even depression. At a minimum, it likely contributed to exhaustion.

But, at the same time, the last year has also revealed our underlying humanity. The extent to which we care about other people. The depth at which we hold our beliefs about our country. The potential we have when we work together (hello, COVID-19 vaccine!).

Given all this, there has never been a greater need for a focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) – both in our society and in our organizations. We have a need to understand each other and to work together, more than ever before.

Organizations throughout the world have recognized this, from top leaders to DEIB leaders to managers and employees. It’s for this reason companies are talking about DEIB more in their earnings reports than ever before and why the number of DEIB job openings has skyrocketed. The thing is this: organizations cannot just talk about DEIB and hire people to lead it. That is a good start, but it’s not enough. Organizations need to change their systems, practices, and behaviors. The change cannot just rely on individuals – it has to be baked into how the organization operates.

This is where DEIB technology can help, as it has the potential to build in practices, behaviors, insights, and recommendations that address bias. It can also provide insights about what is actually happening with people (versus relying on anecdote-based understanding) at the moment of critical decision-making about talent.

Tripping down memory lane

When we first began studying the D&I tech market in 2018, the #MeToo movement had thrust diversity and inclusion in the workspace under a spotlight. Stories and accounts of workplace discrimination, harassment, and unethical behaviors toward women in the workplace led numerous businesses to pledge to change their policies and take action.¹ As a result, organizations began to feel a greater need for systemwide solutions.

In 2018, we launched our first research study on this topic, and we published a comprehensive report, Diversity & Inclusion Technology: The Rise of a Transformative Market, in February 2019. The study included a list of all the D&I vendors we identified and was accompanied by a detailed vendor landscape tool (with 2 updates since). As we shared in our initial report, tech can play a transformative role.

Fast forward to today

We (still) find ourselves in the midst of health, social, and economic crises. 2020 was not an easy year for anyone, but it especially impacted diverse people in many significant ways, including:

• Women left the workforce in record numbers
• Lower-income earners saw their jobs evaporate
• The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others disproportionately impacted the Black community

Many companies have responded by making pledges or promises in support of the #BLM movement.² A large number of them have focused on increasing diversity levels within the companies, both at the employee and leadership levels (for examples of such corporate pledges, see Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging: Creating a Holistic Approach for 2021).

As the pressure to follow through on these promises increases, leaders must develop strategies to achieve them––and we believe that DEIB tech represents one of the critical components of the process (see Figure 2 further down). Sophisticated tech––such as artificial intelligence (AI), deep machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and organizational network analysis (ONA)––can help leaders manage DEIB better and more easily and are increasingly becoming more accepted as essential tools for people practices.³

Through this report, we aim to achieve 4 things:

1. Help leaders understand the role of DEIB tech
2. Provide insights on the state of the DEIB tech market
3. Highlight the talent areas focused by vendors
4. Guide leaders who may be looking to make tech investments

Key Findings

The study covers three major areas and how they have changed since 2019: the DEIB tech market, talent areas vendors focus on, and what buyers should consider before investing. We also address what we see coming next. Some of the key findings from the study include the following:

1. Three major shifts punctuate the current DEIB tech market
   • In previous years, leaders were especially focused on gender; in 2020-21, the emphasis has evolved to include a focus on race and ethnicity.
   • Social justice movements and conversations around discriminatory workplace practices and behaviors have led to greater attention to inclusion than ever before.
   • The role of AI in mitigating bias to enhance DEIB has come front and center, and more approaches have been introduced to address this issue.
2. The DEIB tech market is hotter than ever
   • The global market size is estimated to be $313 million and growing, up from $100 million in 2019.
   • The number of HR tech vendors offering features or functionalities that cater to DEIB as part of their solutions has increased by 136% since 2019.
   • The total number of DEIB tech vendors increased by 87%, with a total of 196 vendors in the market for 2021, compared with 105 in 2019.
3. People analytics for DEIB has arrived
   • Lack of analytics and insights on DEIB is the primary challenge the majority of vendors help their customers solve, hence the growing number of solutions. providing DEIB analytics in 2021 compared to 2019 (28% vs 26%, respectively).
4. Small-sized organizations and knowledge industries remain the main customers of DEIB tech
   • The largest customer category is small-sized organizations (those with less than 1000 employees), who represent almost 30% of all DEIB vendor customers.
   • However, these small organizations represent a smaller percentage of DEIB vendor customers in 2021 than in 2019, and there was an increase in the percentage of customer organizations in the 10,000-50,000 range.
   • The industries most likely to be DEIB tech customers are concentrated in knowledge industries, namely technology, financial, banking, and insurance.

Check Out the Full Study and Tool

The full study (available to members) has lots more information than what we’ve detailed here, including many more details on the market, customer quotes and feedback, and checklists for leaders interested in DEIB tech.

In addition, we encourage you to check out the brand new, fully redesigned DEIB Tech tool, which is available both to members and non-members. You can look at the 196 vendors in each of the four talent areas and their relevant sub-categories. RedThread members can click through and see details on individual vendors.

 

 

RedThread members can see the areas of talent vendors focus on, the top industries served, vendor capabilities, strengths, challenges addressed, and customer feedback (see Figure 3). We provide the maximum amount of information we can, based on what vendors shared with us or what we were able to find publicly available. This tool is designed to be evergreen, so it will be updated continuously as we conduct briefings throughout the year.

 

A Thank You

This study involves a significant time investment from everyone who participated in its development. We want to thank all of the vendors and customers who gave their time, energy, and expertise to make this such a robust study and tool.

If you have any questions about this research or about becoming a RedThread member, please contact us at [email protected].

 

 

DEIB Technology Tool

This tool provides information for leaders, their teams, and their orgs on DEIB tech vendors, the capabilities they say they offer, and their company details. To learn more about the DEIB tech landscape, read the
DEIB Tech 2021 Overview of the report.

 

Explore the tool

• Click to select the boxes. The vendors that offer solutions in the selected categories will display in a list below the tool.
• To search for a particular vendor, click the magnifying glass icon.
• RedThread members who are logged into the website can click on vendors' names to view more details.
• Click twice on the circular arrow to clear filters and start over.
• Hover over any field to see a definition of that term.

New vendors

If you would like to be included in our tool, please take our survey!

Existing vendors

If you are already included in our tool, but would like to share updated information, feel free to reach out to us!

Give feedback

We'd love your suggestions for how we can improve this tool.
Or just email us at [email protected]!

This tool provides information for leaders, their teams, and their orgs on DEIB tech vendors, the capabilities they say they offer, and their company details. To learn more about the DEIB tech landscape, read the
DEIB Tech 2021 Overview of the report.

 

Explore the tool

• Click to select the boxes. The vendors that offer solutions in the selected categories will display in a list below the tool.
• To search for a particular vendor, click the magnifying glass icon.
• RedThread members who are logged into the website can click on vendors' names to view more details.
• Click twice on the circular arrow to clear filters and start over.
• Hover over any field to see a definition of that term.

New vendors

If you would like to be included in our tool, please take our survey!

Existing vendors

If you are already included in our tool, but would like to share updated information, feel free to reach out to us!

Give feedback

We'd love your suggestions for how we can improve this tool.
Or just email us at [email protected]!

In light of the events of 2020, organizations and leaders face greater expectations to act on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), expand their current efforts, and enable honest conversations on DEIB topics. As they prepare for 2021, DEIB leaders looking to develop their strategy should approach it by focusing on six areas. This infographic summarizes our findings on those 6 areas and what leaders can expect in 2021. For more, read our report Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging: Creating A Holistic Approach For 2021 

Click on the image below to get the full infographic. As always, we would love your feedback, which you can provide in the comments section below the infographic. 

 

Q&A Call Video

Transcript

Introduction/What Are You Seeing?

Dani Johnson (00:00):

Okay. So I think we're recording. Let's just check that really fast. Yeah. Okay, great. Great. So we got that whole conversation right there on tape, I think it'll be riveting for those listening later. But welcome to our last Q and A call of the year where we're going to be talking about 2021 trends. Some of the things that we've seen this year, and some of the things that we have a really good feeling are going to drip over into next year. And I'm here with Stacia Garr we're co-founders and principal analyst of RedThread Research. And I have a dog barking under my desk. So if you hear it, that's what that is just a brief introduction to RedThread. If you're not familiar with us, we are a human capital research membership firm, and we focus on things like learning and career and performance and people analytics, diversity and inclusion has been big for us this year. And all of the technology associated with any of those things. We also cover pretty in depth. Especially this time of year, we get a lot of, we get a lot of pieces out on learning technology.

Stacia Garr (01:07):

Yep. And just to put a finer point on that. So we just launched the formal membership here in December for folks who don't know there's still quite a lot of content available for, for those who are maybe not quite yet ready to become a member. But the idea is, is to kind of formalize the membership and also allow us to do research that's not sponsored. So it's gonna allow us to expand the breadth and the type of research that we do here in 2021.

Dani Johnson (01:39):

Awesome. So today we're going to talk about 2021 trends. We're going to want to start with a question for those of you who are out there. We obviously don't know everything and we say that regularly. We would love to understand what you're saying, what you think trends will be in the upcoming year. So you can either use the chat we're big on chat for introverts, but also if you have, if you just, we've given everybody permission to talk. So let's just have a conversation about some of the trends that we're seeing out there.

Speaker 1 (02:19):

This is Speaker 1. My favorite topics are the digital learning, of course. So if everything's online, if everyone's working from home, if everyone is now needing to be sort of working remotely and independently you know, that affects the tools and technologies that affects performance and goals. What skills and strengths do you need now compared to before? So much of that just goes under, you know, the large heading of digital. And then also like you mentioned, the I liked how you included the phrase belonging in your diversity and inclusion, and so kind of that engagement piece. So, you know, how do people connect in 2021 when you're digital?

Stacia Garr (03:17):

Great. Yeah, and we we actually had a big debate about that internally because we were, you know, the move seems to be to DEI diversity, equity and inclusion. And, you know, I think that belonging piece is really important and we're like, well, it's, you know, four letter for four words, is that too much for an acronym? And we just said, you know what, we're just gonna, it's, it's everything. So we're, we're doing all four.

Dani Johnson (03:43):

I think you hit on a couple of really good ones, Jackie, and some of the things that we're seeing, so learning obviously is expanding quite a bit. And then, and then obviously the diversity and inclusion we've seen sort of ramp this year as well. What are others seeing?

Speaker 2 (04:06):

Hi, this is Speaker 2. Can you hear me? So I knew you know, at my organization, a lot of our current work is really focused on on skills and just, you know, kind of individualizing learning experiences for people so that they are able to improve specific skills that they want in relation to their job or future roles. So that that's something that, you know, I foresee us being focused on next year is personalization. And then how do we help people acquire new skills, right. That they're gonna need and kind of keep up with the evolving change of, of, of their roles within the organization.

Dani Johnson (05:08):

Yeah, I think you're right. So I think we've seen that discussion go on for a while now. And I think we're at the point where it's actually gonna do some good, this whole idea of skills. One more, one more comment before we move on in chat says continuing performance management, and what skills of the future look like, how they'll evolve and how do we prepare people for them. So kind of along with what's he saying skills. Anything else before we move on?

The 10 Big Trends

Trend 1: DEIB Critical To All People Practices

Dani Johnson (05:44):

All right. So Stacia and I recently put together our research roadmap for the coming year, and we're seeing basically 10 big trends and they've kind of fall in buckets. So we want to talk through these trends very quickly before we get to the questions, we had a lot of really good questions that were submitted this time. So the first one that we're seeing is DEIB be critical to all people practices. And I'm going to actually let Stacia talk about that one first.

Stacia Garr (06:09):

Yeah. So I think for those of you, who've seen research that I've done in the past on DEIB our recent strategy report that just came out a couple of weeks ago, the integration of DEIB into everything else that we do is something that we've been talking about for a long time, but it feels like now we're seeing that catch up everywhere else. Which is really exciting whether that's from a, you know, just a general practices and awareness perspective, but also from the tech we're going to be publishing our DEIB tech report the second week of January. And so we're going to talk a lot about some of the changes that have happened there, but I think the most remarkable one and this is a little preview for you all, is that we've actually seen the market size increase by three times since when we did the study in 2019, we published in January, 2019, so two years ago.

Stacia Garr (07:07):

And we think that that just incredible market growth reflects the fact that people are looking to integrate across all the different practices and interested in how tech can be used to, to accelerate that. I know we've got a question a little bit more deeply on, on the tech side of this. So I won't jump to that too much right now, but we just are seeing this show up much more broadly has felt like for a number of years, we were kind of saying this was important and now we're seeing people reflect it back to us, which is really exciting.

Dani Johnson (07:36):

Yeah. And I've been surprised at how much it's creeped into some of the other discussions like skills and, and mobility, for example, it's, it's becoming an imperative to pay attention to an all these other areas.

Trend 2: Managers as connectors

Dani Johnson (07:47):

Same thing we're seeing is a managers as connectors.

Stacia Garr (07:51):

Yeah. So this one is in my space as well. So for those of you who follow our stuff, you may have seen that we did a big study on managers that came out in mid October and what we did there was, it was so cool. Like we do a lot of research and I think all of it's cool, but like this piece was really cool because we had done a snapshot of organizational and manager behaviors actually this time last year, literally actually I remember we closed the survey on December 17th, so literally a year ago. And then, so it was right before the pandemic started. And then we were able to do a comparison of what was happening with managers and their behaviors during the pandemic. So we've rerun the survey in September and October of this year. And one of the shifts that we saw, well, we actually saw two big shifts in that study.

Stacia Garr (08:39):

One was that the amount of autonomy that individual employees felt they had went up as you would expect with what happened with the pandemic. But then second, they said that managers were much more open to new ideas, which was, which was really good. And what you would hope for. The challenge we saw was that pretty much every other support, whether it be through the manager or through the organization, every other support that employees received went down. And so as you think about moving into our, you know, whatever this, this new reality is going to look like, we know that a big portion of it is going to be a higher percentage of workers who are remote. And because of that their managers are going to be even more important than in the past. And in many ways the managers are going to be the connector to the organization in a way that wasn't necessarily as true in an office setting. And so we think that as we look to the future, the question is, is how, what, you know, better understanding that shift for managers and how managers can help connect employees more broadly into the organization is going to be a big theme for this year.

Dani Johnson (09:40):

The other part of that is a lot of times managers, we haven't talked to one organization where, to who is like, Oh yeah, our managers just kill it. They're awesome. A lot of managers don't have the skills that they need in order to do some of the things that Stacy was talking about. And so we've seen a big uptick in the conversations around performance management and learning and mobility and all of these things where managers are, or managers are a part of those discussions as well, where we haven't necessarily seen that in the past. So instead of sort of a standalone thing, we're actually seeing managers integrated more into these different things as well.

Trend 3: Mobility is a focus

Dani Johnson (10:14):

Third one is mobility. Mobility is definitely a focus. I think part of this is because of some of the things that have happened this year with respect to large swaths of organizations being furloughed hand their skills not being needed right at this very minute, we're seeing this a lot, especially with frontline workers. And so mobility has really become a focus we're in the middle of a research project, actually, we're done with the research part and we're in the writing portion of mobility right now. And one of the really interesting things is the switch in the past mobility has mostly been used for retention and for engagement purposes. And now we're seeing organizations also include things like need making sure that we've got the skills in the right place, making sure that we have the right skills. And so moving people around to develop those skills, et cetera. The other thing that we're seeing where it comes to mobility is a lot of our vendor friends have come to us and said, Hey, we've got this new mobility project or product. They would really like you to see and give us feedback on. So it's not just the learning leaders and the business, the people leaders that are seeing this it's also is the vendors that are recognizing that this is a thing and will probably continue to be a thing into the future.

Dani Johnson (11:28):

Any, any comments on that Stacia? Any thoughts?

Stacia Garr (11:31):

Well, I think, you know, it, it ties into some of the other things that you're going to mention here, but, but you know, the focus on skills and kind of, you know, skills, not in isolation, but skills is kind of part of an enablement of other things that are really important

Dani Johnson (11:44):

For sure. And if you've seen a theme so far with just these three it's that some of those walls between some of the silos we've seen within the people practices are really breaking. And we're having to have wider discussions across the organization about how we deal with people on how we help people rather than staying within our talent acquisition and our learning and our performance silos.

Trend 4: Definition of "learning" expands

Dani Johnson (12:05):

The next one is the definition of learning expands. And we've been talking about this one for a while now, but in the past six to seven months, we've seen this really sort of accelerate. We're no longer just talking about courses and we're no longer just talking about the LMS. We're actually defining, learning very broadly. What does it take in order to help people plan? How do we helping people discover what they need? How do we help people experiment? What's our, what's our take on failure in the organization and how can we get people to learn from them? All of these things sort of wrap around this idea of learning, which we're sort of moving toward employee development, because we think that's a more inclusive term. How are we, how are we developing people in our organization to get not just them where they want to go, but where to get the organization where it needs to go. And we think we'll continue to see that through this year and probably beyond that.

Trend 5: Not just skills, skills as an enabler

Dani Johnson (12:58):

And then the final one, a couple of you have mentioned already is skills. We've actually been following the skills conversation for years. Like we started, we started listening about four years ago and I've had regular conversations with companies like Deloitte and Microsoft to kind of understand how they're viewing it and what they're doing and what they see as important. One of the things that we find really interesting about the last six months is we're not just talking about skills, we're talking about skills as an enabler. And so until the, the, the COVID crisis gathering skills and figuring out a skills data was more of a a conversation that we were having with ourselves rather than figuring out what to do with that information to help actually enable things in the organization. And so some of the things that we've seen over the last little while is we can barely have a conversation about mobility without also talking about skills.

Dani Johnson (13:52):

We can't, we seem to be running into diversity, inclusion, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging all the time when we're talking about skills. So all of these things where we're talking about, you know, giving people opportunities to develop these skills and moving people in the organization to develop these skills, have that diversity and inclusion component associated with them. And the same thing with data, why are we collecting this data? Where's this data going, what's it going to do, et cetera. And so we think the conversation is shifting from skills and re-skilling, and the whole sort of philosophical discussion that we've been having for four years on skills. We think it's finally firming up a little bit and we're using skills as an enabler. We're going to do the skill thing, but why are we going to do these, the skill thing we're going to do it for very specific reasons within the organization? Any thoughts, there Stacia?

Stacia Garr (14:39):

Yeah. And I think that, that this also ties in really well to this you know, the, the heating up of the market around, you know, specifics skills and specific needs that organizations have moving forward. And so we're starting, I feel like we're starting to see a lot more specificity and it ties into actually our next trend here, but a lot more specificity around what are the skills that we need, not just like, Oh, the, the, you know, like top 10 general skills we need in 2021. But like, as an organization, as we're actually doing our planning, what are the, what are the skills into what extent do we need them in order to do X, Y or Z thing? So it just feels like it's kind of gone from being up here in the sky and a little bit ephemeral to a lot more concrete around what we're trying to do.

Dani Johnson (15:25):

Yeah. I think you're right. And I think it's also changed the way that organizations are thinking about their people. So up until about six months ago, we were talking mostly about, okay, how do we get the skills? And a lot of times the question was we buy them. But, but since, since there's a shortage of pretty much everything right now we're seeing organizations say, okay, well, how do we develop these skills, and what people need to develop these skills and all of those kinds of conversations have come in that, that weren't there before that I think makes the skills discussion much more interesting and much more concrete and much more actionable.

Trend 6: Data as a crucial element of success

Dani Johnson (15:55):

Data as a crucial element of success.

Stacia Garr (16:01):

Yeah. And so, and so this ties in really well, you know, it's fun cause Dani and I kind of, we have our swim lanes to a certain extent, but they often intersection and the skills conversation is actually one of the biggest examples of how they've been intersecting. So so Dani has been doing a lot of work on kind of skills from a learning perspective and what's happening there. And then I've been doing a lot of work in understanding skills from a data perspective. And, and what's fascinating, isn't in so many organizations, those too late to parallel paths remain parallel and they're, they are not intersecting. And so a big thing that we're going to talk about this year is, is how should they be intersecting? Cause there clearly is talking about the same skills, the same people, the same need in the organization, but it's just tends to happen in two different parts of the organization.

Stacia Garr (16:48):

And so skills is a great example of that with, with data. But I think there's a lot of others. For, again, for those of you who follow what we do, we just publish the people analytics tech study last week. And in that we talked a lot about kind of just a range of, of capabilities that that technologies are now offering folks. And I think the underlying message though from 2020 was that tech, or I'm sorry, that people analytics and then the tech that enables it is more important than ever, you know, as we saw workers go into to leave the office and work from home, there was this incredible sense from leaders that we don't necessarily know what's happening. We don't know what's happening necessarily from an engagement perspective or what's working or what people need. And so we saw the role of people, analytics just really shine this year.

Stacia Garr (17:37):

And I expect that shine not to come off, if you will. You know, I think that now that people have kind of seen the value of it, they're not going to be willing to relinquish it. And so we see that particularly for employee engagement and experience, but we're also seeing that more broadly as we start to see different platforms that can bring in a whole lot of different information and to give us a much more nuanced understanding of what's happening for people, what helps them achieve success and also what are some of the warning signs that we should be looking for? So I just think that we're going to continue to see 2021 as a year to bring in data and to start to really do this analysis with the idea that it will really begin to impact business outcomes in a very large and meaningful way in 2022.

Dani Johnson (18:20):

Yeah. I think one of the outcomes of that too will be that all of the people practices are going to have to start thinking differently about how they do their job, because if you think about it up until fairly recently we've all used our gut to determine whether we hire somebody or, you know, where we move people or all of those things have been largely, you know, how someone's performing has been largely based on gut, but with some of the things that we've seen this year with, with data and technology, we have a much more unbiased view that helps us make decisions better, but also that we can push down to individuals to help them make, make decisions better, which I'm pretty excited about.

Stacia Garr (18:55):

Yeah. And it, and it connects back to the point around DEIB being integrated with everything. You know, that's one of the biggest opportunities is this connection between DEIB and data and people analytics using it to make less biased decisions, help us understand where bias may exist in organizations and to flag that in critical moments of decision-making. We're gonna dig into that topic in Q1. Because I think I've, to be honest, I've been just trying to get there is Dani now for the last three or four months, and we just had other things on the agenda that had to get finished up. But for me, I think that's a huge topic for 2021

Trend 7: Humanizing of human resources

Dani Johnson (19:32):

Humanizing of human resources. I think this is a really interesting one to talk about right after we talked about data. Sometimes we think of data as sort of non-human and cold and exacting. But what we're seeing is that some of this data is being used to actually humanize human resources a little bit more. I think we're also seeing it, this idea of humanization, when we think about kind of how we've addressed this crisis versus how we addressed the last crisis, it's pretty different. So in 2008, a bunch of people got laid off. We didn't, we were more concerned about the world in the economy and the business. And we were about those people this time around, it seems a little bit different. And I don't know if it's because of, because COVID is a really personal thing, or maybe I'm hoping we've evolved as the human race just a little bit, but we are starting to understand that, that the human part of human resources is a really, really important thing. So we've talked about that with the DEIB, we've talked about it with managers and making sure that they connect people, talked about it with that data and how it helps us become more human by making better decisions and less biased decisions. But we think in general, sort of the humanizing of human resources and the experience associated with working we'll continue along that path.

Dani Johnson (20:45):

Any thoughts there Stacia?

Stacia Garr (20:49):

No.

Dani Johnson (20:49):

Apologies for putting you on the spot there.

Trend 8: Purposeful, holistic employee experience

Dani Johnson (20:53):

Purposeful holistic employee experience.

Stacia Garr (20:58):

Yeah. So again, this year we spent a lot of time talking about purpose and the role of purpose and organizations and, and the and how we've seen that kind of tying back to what Dani just said, seeing that really show up in the midst of this pandemic. And, and we expect that to continue in the purpose research, we talked about, you know, it's this just a fad, this whole focus on purpose. And we think not for a whole bunch of reasons that I could go into, but I think that, that, that this focus on connecting having a clear organizational purpose and enabling employees to connect their own purpose to it is going to continue tied into that is this idea again, of this holistic employee experience. And I think there are actually two ways to read holistic. One is you know, is actually Jackie mentioned at the beginning, there has been this big shift to digital.

Stacia Garr (21:49):

And before the pandemic, I felt like we were talking about kind of the digital workplace and then the, you know, in-person workplace and with the pandemic, we've really seen those to integrate and have to think about kind of this more holistic perspective of what does an employee experience mean. Now, when you, when you layer in purpose into that, I think you're not just talking about kind of the nuts and bolts of an employee experience, but really about how does all of that come together and enable an individual to achieve their purpose and enable the organization to achieve the purpose. Their purpose is we think as we look to 2021, we're going to start to see, we are already seeing all of those things kind of meld together in a way that I think is much more holistic and much more, again, human than what we've seen in the past. So not just a digital experience, not just an in-person experience, but really all purposeful holistic employee experience.

Stacia Garr (22:41):

Dani, did you have anything you want to add there?

Dani Johnson (22:42):

Yeah, I think again, that, that data is helping us provide that really personal experience to individuals. And so it's, we're not doing, we're not putting in people in personas anymore. We're not talking about job roles anymore. We're talking about providing that employee experience. That's really personal to the individual and we're able to do that because of some of the advances we've seen in data and technology,

Trend 9: Building networks, changing work

Dani Johnson (23:02):

Building networks and changing work. And I'm going to let, Stacia start on this one too.

Stacia Garr (23:06):

Yeah. So one of the outcomes of the pandemic and people working remotely is that and we know this from a number of the organizational network analysis vendors is that we are seeing people strengthened their immediate network and their immediate relationships with the people that they work with on the day-to-day, but their weaker connections are dying away. And that is problematic for a couple of reasons on the individual level. We know that diverse people tend to have led to be in lower power networks and so, and have weaker connections to higher power networks. So if we think about kind of all the benefits of diversity and all the need to accelerate the, the rise of diverse individuals in the organization that weakening of those networks is a challenge. And then secondly, for the organization, we know that if we have less diversity, we have less of all sorts of other benefits including critically innovation.

Stacia Garr (24:02):

And so, as we think about kind of longterm moving in this new world of, of how we're going to work together you know, there will be a larger percentage of the workforce who are remote. So we've got a real nut to crack we think around how do we make sure that people are still building networks, still making connections? You know, we talked about managers as connectors and that's great, but we all know that that cannot be the only, or the strong, you know, just the it needs to be one of many strong connections. And so we think there's a conversation here around how do we make sure that people are being connected in ways that are meaningful, that allowed them to grow, that allowed them to get access to the opportunities they need with an overall benefit to the whole organization.

Dani Johnson (24:42):

And I think the other part of that, that trend that we're seeing is the changing of work we're seeing work, adjust to accommodate remote better than it ever has before. And the whole world is talking about this right now. So we're not going to address it too much right now, but it will probably, it will most likely, it'll definitely creep into some of the things that we write about because it literally having a remote workforce. And some of the things that have happened this year literally changed the way that we work.

Trend 10: Acceleration…of everything

Dani Johnson (25:07):

And our final one is the acceleration of pretty much everything. So just an example of this, we had a conversation with an organization that was trying to implement an LXP, a learning experience platform at the beginning of the year. And they had this year and a half long plan, and they were going to roll it out to different parts of the organization at different times, et cetera, et cetera.

Dani Johnson (25:28):

And then COVID hit and they were, they had everybody online within three weeks. So one of the things that we think will take a lot of time don't necessarily take the time we think they will. And we're seeing this in pretty much everything. So diversity and inclusion has stepped up, but this year learning has stepped up this year. And the importance of managers has stepped up pretty much everything on this slide has, has been accelerated at least a little bit by COVID in some of that, the DEIB challenges with that we've seen this year, and we don't necessarily think that's going to slow down now that we know that we can get stupid work out of the way and do things faster. And we think it's probably going to continue. Any thoughts there Stacia?

Stacia Garr (26:11):

No, I agree. I think I'd love to hear what other people think though, now that we've kind of laid out our 10 for 2021,

Dani Johnson (26:19):

Any thoughts on this and please feel free to use the the chat as well.

Speaker 1 (26:29):

This is Speaker 1 again, I love the example that you just gave where under previous project planning, that's a year, year and a half, but under crisis it's three weeks. Like that's amazing. It'd be interesting to follow up with them in a year to see, you know, and how's it going now? You know, did it, did it all fall into place just like you expected?

Dani Johnson (26:50):

Yeah, no, I think you're right, Jackie. And we definitely will. I'd love to, I'd love to understand kind of what happens with that organization. I think sometimes we're afraid to introduce change into an organization because we're afraid of the pushback when everybody's sort of rallied around one, cause things tend to go smoother. And so it'll be interesting to see how much change we can continue to push without sort of that, that unifying challenge and bolt says, I love the holistic employee experience, huge topic for us.

Speaker 1 (27:20):

Yeah.

Dani Johnson (27:22):

Any other thoughts here before we move on to your questions or anything we missed or anything we missed?

Stacia Garr (27:27):

We have plenty of contenders who almost made this list.

Dani Johnson (27:39):

Okay. Please continue to comment and share Stacia and I are big on making sure that everyone understands that we don't know everything and how we learn and how we develop and how we make this. The most useful thing possible is to integrate other people's ideas and thoughts and questions. So the questions that we got we got a good chunk of questions we chose about eight of them.

Are there any "usual" trends that override disruption?

Dani Johnson (28:00):

The first one is, are there any usual trends that override disruption? Which we thought it was a really interesting question and we actually put it at the front because we wanted to talk a little bit about it. Just kind of going back to the trends that we've talked about. Some of the things that have been ramping for years now is diversity and inclusion. The DEIB has been ramping for years, the learning trend, it used to be not that that important within organizations and now has become very important, not just to individuals, but also to senior leaders. Data has been ramping for a really long time as well. So we think some of these definitely overrides sort of the crisis that we're in, which means they probably have a longer, their trajectory is still going up. Stacia anything to other,

Stacia Garr (28:46):

Yeah. I think employee experience and purpose. I think that that's another one, you know, again, back to our purpose research you know, we talked about how the business round table made their change to the statement on the purpose of a corporation in August, 2019. So that was clearly before this. And you know, the business round table doesn't do anything until it let's just say they're not the fastest moving most on the cutting edge of, of stating these types of changes. So I think they were really kind of an indication of a long lead up to this focus on broader purpose in stakeholder capitalism. So we think that one and then that integration with employee experience again, was something that we were seeing before this. So I'd just underscore that one too, right?

Stacia Garr (29:32):

Any thoughts from, from you all, are there trends that you've seen sort of accelerated by COVID, but maybe were in place before?

Speaker 3 (29:48):

This is Speaker 3. I have seen a lot more interest in how do we communicate, not just what programs are in place for DEIB, but how do we effectively communicate and connect all of our staff to these initiatives? So before it was a lot of people would just be doing it or not a lot, but some people would be working on it. But now we see more people, I should say more executives than at the board level of the companies that I'm working with are connecting and wanting to make sure that their entire company knows their role in DEIB.

Dani Johnson (30:25):

Yeah. I really like that example. I think that's sort of a perfect example of what we're talking about here. DEIB, we've been, we've all been given it sort of we've, we've been talking about it for years, but now it goes clear up to the board level of Stacia was telling me before this call that we've never seen a higher need for, what did you call them Stacia? The Chief Inclusion Officers?

Stacia Garr (30:46):

Chief Diversity Officers.

Dani Johnson (30:49):

Officers at the top of the organization who are actually giving some real time and effort and consequently budget to, to some of these things that we've been trying to solve for years with volunteer panels and things like that.

Stacia Garr (31:01):

Yeah. Yeah. Just to kind of, to jump on that, you know, we've we published this DEIB strategy report, and one of the things we talked about there was the executives are more open to the DEIB topic more broadly, and I have this is totally a thought experiment, but I'm going to share it with you guys. Cause I think it's kind of interesting. I wonder if part of the reason for the greater openness and the greater desire to move the needle here is that we, by when the social justice movement started this summer at that point we were depending on where you were roughly around three months into the COVID crisis. And I think that through COVID a lot of executives got a whole lot more comfortable with being able to say we don't necessarily know all the answers, this is hard.

Stacia Garr (31:52):

We're doing our best. We're, you know, a much more compassionate, empathetic, open, and potentially vulnerable leadership approach than what we would have seen, you know, six months prior. And so I wonder if some of this greater openness and some of this greater desire to actually maybe properly fix some of the DEIB challenges we have was a result of leaders already kind of having just gone through this, you know, very challenging initial experience with, with COVID and having already adopted kind of a more empathetic posture. So we'll, we'll see if that's kind of a long-term change and if that continues to play out. But I do have a strong hunch that that may have contributed to this greater level of openness.

Speaker 2 (32:38):

Hi, this is Speaker 2, Stacia. Just to kind of jump off of what you were saying. I've noticed in the organization that I am in very heavy involvement, like up to the CEO receiving, you know, emails and messages, even like you know, senior VP leader of leaders, of business units, holding all day conferences and just kind of having their face and their thoughts and out there. Which I think is really interesting because that, that's sort of the first time I'm seeing this embrace by senior leaders all the way up to the CEO being very vocal about this topic.

Stacia Garr (33:25):

Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, that that's something we heard from a lot of folks when we did the interviews for that study. And I think it reflects this broader shift that we've seen actually in the in the Edelman trust barometer, where they talk about they, they Edelman focus on within the U S but, you know, by and large us consumers expect companies to do something about social justice and about diversity equity, inclusion, belonging in their organizations. And I think that is actually then translating to action. There was a really cool data point and I need to see if there's an updated one where it said that in Q1. So just before the kind of the pandemic really got going the just 4% of S&P 500 companies talked about diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging on their earnings calls with investors. And in Q2, that number shot up to 40%. And so I think, you know, there is this heightened awareness that DEIB can have such big impacts on the organizations. And so there is a that greater executive embrace as you mentioned, Speaker 2.

Speaker 2 (34:36):

Yeah. And I think even just showing vulnerability in terms of like, you know, we don't have the answers, we want to work on finding solutions. And you know, we, it's important to keep talking about it and keep the dialogue open. So I think just, you know, whereas before it, might've kind of been not addressed or kind of swept under the rug, like we don't need to address this. I find that leaders are now getting at the forefront of it and addressing things that you know, incidents of social injustice that might happen and say, you know, this is unfortunate. We don't have the answers, but, you know, feel free to reach out if you want to talk about it. So,

Stacia Garr (35:23):

Yeah, definitely. And Marlene, I see your comment. I'll see if I can find the study and send it out to you all. It was RBC. Did the, did the research.

Dani Johnson (35:36):

just to wrap this one, someone says that he and his organization, they're seeing more interest in visual collaboration and digital workspaces as people move as people, as more people work from home. And I think that's, I think that's awesome, first of all. And secondly, I think it's needed we've seen more acceptance of some of the things that we use as well. We use a tool called Miro and we've been able to take that into a couple of organizations and introduce them to something like that that allows you to still do some of those sort of hands-on group activities that need to be done in order to get the work done and in a digital way. So we're thinking, that's fantastic.

How are organizations putting their 2020 DEIB commitments into action?

Dani Johnson (36:11):

The next couple of questions have to do with DEIB. So we'll continue that conversation. How are organizations putting their 2020, their DEIB commitments into action in 2021? And do you have examples?

Stacia Garr (36:25):

Yeah. So, and, and I'd love other folks comments and thoughts here, but I'll kind of kick us off here. You know, one of the things we saw was immediately after the murder of George Floyd that a lot of organizations made kind of very public commitments with regard to what they were going to do with DEIB. So, you know, for instance, we saw like you know, Adidas saying that they were going to fill 30% of their open positions at Adidas and Reebok with lacquer or Latino or Latina candidates. IBM said they were not going to offer or research facial recognition technology because of potential human rights abuses. We saw Facebook and a whole bunch of other organizations talk about the number of black and Latinx employees that were going to bring into the organization.

Stacia Garr (37:20):

They said they were going to double them. And then there were a whole bunch of organizations that pledged to make large contributions to you know, black lives matter, NAACP ACLU, et cetera, et cetera. So, so we saw a lot of immediate action right after, and then I feel like some of the changes that came down or that I feel like then what has happened is organizations have begun to go away. Do some of the hard work mentioned, you know even in, in, I think there was an article in the wall street journal in July that said the chief diversity officer was the hottest job right now in the market. And, and the number of DEIB professionals I've personally seen, just move has been pretty astounding and used to, and it feels like there's a DEIB role at pretty much every company that wasn't there three months ago.

Stacia Garr (38:07):

So I think right now organizations are starting to do the work of putting more people, more investment into their organizations. But what that's going to translate to on the other side is I think still an open question, you know, there's and then I think there's also a question of how they're going to talk about it because there are a lot of changes that organizations will make, particularly as their results and their, their mix of talent and their focus on accelerating particular types of talent that may not get into the news. It may not be, I'm almost certain, it's not going to be the thing that they put into their CSR ESG reporting. And so I think that there's going to be kind of a dance that organizations have to do as they try to demonstrate that they're walking, you know, that they're walking the talk but do it in a way that one, their legal teams feel comfortable with. Cause that's been a big, you know, throttle on DEIB efforts as well as the publication of what's happening with them. So what their, their legal teams are comfortable with and then also what they feel like kind of furthers their, their talent brand. So I think that there are things that are happening, particularly with regard to talent acquisition, and then also talent mobility. But I think it's going to take a little bit of time for us to see them.

Stacia Garr (39:22):

Do I see your comment if the compensation for DEIB roles will improve? I think, I think it will. And I think it already has begun because the talent market is so tight right now for DEIB roles. So I think that's a good call out.

Dani Johnson (39:34):

I think someone actually surfaced a couple of good questions too. So there's the one, she says, one thing that comes to mind as we talk about one so much focus on moving digital and to DEIB is the need to keep in mind the portion of the workforce that can not work digitally. How are they being supported and included in opportunities, et cetera. So really good question. One of the things that I think we're seeing is some of the technology is allowing us to address some of the challenges with the DEIB, even though those are frontline workers and cannot work digitally. And so even that, well, the aspect of digital that affects them as different, but we're still using some of those digital tools to make sure that we're taking care of them. The other thing that we're seeing just no past, and I think this pretty predates COVID two is more of a focus on frontline workers. So a lot of learning tech and tech in general has been focused on exempt workers, people that work in an office. We've seen that shift a little bit as new tools come out and new awareness comes out of, you know, as organizations realize the value of those workers and understand the need for them to grow and develop as well.

Dani Johnson (40:44):

Any other thoughts or questions on this question? All right.

What are the top 3 DEIB goals that are contributing to DEIB tech buying?

Dani Johnson (40:52):

Let's move on to the second DEIB question, which is what are the top three DEIB goals that are contributing to DEIB tech buying?

Stacia Garr (41:01):

Yeah, so And the pet study, we talk a bit about this. So, so the kind of the top three areas that we saw as a, as an area of focus were employee engagement and experience DEIB analysis and monitoring. And that was a big shift, like a few when we did the study last year that was much lower. So that was number two that showed up number two. And then the third one was performance management when we, when we looked at kind of the, the analytics side. And so when we're thinking about kind of the DEIB intersection here, a lot of it is understanding, you know, amongst those three kind of really critical areas, what's happening with people. What are, what do we need to understand about our different populations and and how their experiences are then influencing their the kind of what's going to happen with the talent pipeline overall.

Stacia Garr (42:00):

So we know that representation numbers are backwards looking. And so now I feel like we're starting to see people trying to use the tech to get a little bit farther back into what's happening and to be able to address things a lot faster, but so, so engagement and experience. Certainly like I said, performance management, because that contributes to our ability to advance people in our understanding of how people are performing and their perceptions of what's happening differently. And then the, I should say from the PAT study the learning and development being the third, third one and the understanding of how those learning experiences are different for different populations.

Dani Johnson (42:40):

Great. Any other thoughts on this question? Okay, let's move to the next one.

How are organizations defining mobility?

Dani Johnson (42:48):

How organizations defining mobility. So one of our, the trends that we mentioned earlier, and one of the things that we've seen craziness around is this idea of mobility, moving people in the organization to different parts of the organization. For some reasons, a couple of the biggest reasons that we see the first and I think probably the oldest is we moved people around organizations to, to retain them, to, to give them experience for sure, but to retain them and engage them as part of that larger employee engagement thing that's happening right now. The other thing that we're seeing since COVID is the, the need to move people around the organization to put the right skills in the right places at the right time. So as large parts of organizations have, have become unnecessary, especially given sort of the situation that we're in, we're seeing organizations really ramp up the skilling three skilling and the development to take tangential skills and turn them into the skills that they need in the organization right now.

Dani Johnson (43:49):

So a large communications organization, for example, had to sort of either furlough all of their retail, or it had to retrain them to, to handle some of the online stuff that was coming in at a greater pace, because some of those retail stores were out of commission. And so that's just one example of the way that we've seen organizations sort of think about mobility differently. Another thing that we're seeing is mobility used to mean moving from one job to another job from one role to another role. And that is also sort of being redefined. It's much more of a, I don't want to, I'm not sure how we're going to say this yet in the research, but it's much more of a, sort of a psychological move. So mobility doesn't necessarily mean picking up and moving somewhere, even though a lot of organizations are still thinking about it, that way mobility actually means working out of wherever you are and getting new experiences and new opportunities while maybe still having your home base, where it was before.

Dani Johnson (44:42):

And we're seeing that manifest itself in things like talent open talent, marketplaces. Some people call them gig economies within the organizations. So they're trying out gigs for two or three weeks. We're seeing it in terms of rotations. So you still belong to a central place. But you have the opportunity to experience some new things. In the military, they call them details and they can be up to a year long. And so this idea of mobility is changing to be much more sort of cerebral than it is physical, which I think is really, really interesting. The research that we have coming out in a little bit, sort of talks about how different organizations handle that differently. We have the latter model, which is moving people up, are really defined the latter on, you know, what your put your next step is. We have the lattice model, which has been talked about for 15 years, which is moving people around to give them more breadth.

Dani Johnson (45:28):

We have the agency model, which is what a lot of consulting firms use, which is organizing the people around the work instead of organizing the work around a predefined organization of people. And then we're also seeing quite a bit of organizations start to talk about external workers. So retiree pools and gig workers and contractors and consultants, and those type of people paying attention to them as part of your talent pool and helping the organization understand what skills they have so that they can also be mobilized within different parts of the organization. So we did this study five years ago. We did it again this time I've learned a lot and things have changed quite a bit about about mobility, but those are the biggest things. People are thinking about it more cerebrally than they have in the past. And we're probably including more, more talent pools and, and, and paying attention to skills that skills data to help people get where they need to go. So I'm gonna stop right there for a second. Any questions about mobility?

Stacia Garr (46:29):

You know, I'll just add, as you were talking. I wonder if like, with some of the changes that we've seen with the workforce, like we know we've seen a large percentage of women go out of the workforce, it's like three to one and we've seen other changes around you know, younger workers. And, and I just wonder if all of that will get connected here into mobility, you know, thinking about those different talent pools differently. And, and also, I mean, it seems funny, but we've kind of stopped talking about the whole, you know, baby boomers leaving the workforce, but it's, it's still happening in very great numbers. And so I wonder if this will all kind of end up coming together, particularly as, you know, as we get a vaccine and as potentially the market starts to take off again.

Dani Johnson (47:20):

Yeah, no, I think that's an interesting thought. And as, as walls in organizations continue to become more transparent and permeable as well. When you retire, you don't necessarily retire. You are put into, you know, you're a lot of people still consult with the organizations that they retire from. And so what does that mean for, for the skills that we thought we were going to lose, but maybe we're not losing and the way that people want to move. The other thing that we're seeing that's really interesting is success has to be redefined in this new, in this new sort of way. Not everybody is going to be CEO. We had one organization actually say that not everybody is going to be CEO. And so how do we help people have the best experience and get the best types of experiences that they want and learn what they want to learn while they're here and be okay if they step out of the organization for a while, knowing that we want to keep that relationship good so that they can come back later. So it's, it seems to be that we're rethinking it and we're not necessarily thinking of ownership anymore, but rather relationship, which I think is a pretty healthy way to think about it.

Dani Johnson (48:20):

All right. Any other thoughts here before we move to the next question?

What are the most important questions that HR leaders are trying to answer with data?

Dani Johnson (48:26):

What are the most important questions that HR leaders are trying to answer with data?

Stacia Garr (48:32):

Yeah, I think I kinda touched on this one earlier. But you know, from our, from our PAT study, like I said, it was in playing engagement experience, D&I performance management and learning and development. And so I think what all of that really points to is trying to understand the employee experience much better and to be able to understand, you know, what's going to happen in terms of our talent retention in terms of, you know, what we're gonna need from a skills perspective what we're gonna need from a new talent perspective versus maybe some of these other talent pools. So we're seeing, seeing kind of a focus there, but most immediately the focus has been how are people doing during COVID. And I think that's gonna continue. One thing that didn't actually show up in the PAT study though, that I also am hearing about anecdotally is that focus on wellbeing and burnout. It wasn't in the study. But I think that in something that we're going to hear more about, particularly quite frankly, as we get into February, you know, and for many, many people, the vaccine is still three, four months off. And it just starts to feel hard you know, a long winter, et cetera. So That's what I think.

How important will attention to the remote work be?

Dani Johnson (49:50):

How important will attention to the remote worker be? Pretty important for the next year. I, and I think it will continue to be important. I think I'm hoping there. One of the things that comes out of COVID is enough time understanding how it feels to work remotely, that we have a lot more sympathy, empathy, and impetus to change the way that we work with with our remote counterparts. This one is always really interesting to me cause I've worked remotely for 15 years. Our entire organization is completely remote. We have people working for us that we've never met face-to-face. And so it's, it's an interesting mindset shift to, to take into account remote workers. But I I'm hoping that this has given us enough empathy to sort of think about it differently, moving on. And I think with that, some of the technology that is surfacing per someone's comment to help us do this better is getting better. It's getting better and it's allowing us to do completely different things. We're not just putting the live experience online now. We're actually doing completely different things that may even be very, say a little bit better than, than in-person in some cases. What do you think Stacia?

Stacia Garr (51:06):

Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. I think we're going to the big challenge. I think one of the big challenges of 2021 is going to be, how do we balance when, which, when people are going back to the office, which people go back to the office, which ones maybe don't and with what frequency, and then, you know, when we've all been remote to any more level playing field in some ways. And so as we manage those in office and remote relationships, how do we make sure that we remain inclusive for those who are remote?

Dani Johnson (51:38):

Any thoughts on this one? All right.

Dani Johnson (51:46):

The next one is when things settle down, will purpose still be a thing.

When things settle down will purpose still be a thing?

Stacia Garr (51:49):

So I think you were going to jump in, I saw you come off mute.

Speaker 1 (51:53):

Oh, I was just gonna say one of the phrases I've heard different people saying to you is others have been remote, just like you gave in your example, it's not new to everyone. So I would hope in 2021, those that are well-experienced with working remotely and keeping engaged and keeping on track can, you know, have the bandwidth to reach out to the ones that are struggling. So maybe like like you said, a level playing field because it's not a new thing. It's just new to everybody all at the same time this year for obvious reasons.

Dani Johnson (52:30):

I think that's a really good point. So back to the purpose question, when things settle down, will purpose still be a thing?

Stacia Garr (52:40):

Yes. As I, as I said before, the purpose was, it was a train that had been coming. And I think it's going to still be here when, when this is all said and done. Now you go back to why organizations, you know, clarify their purpose, you know often a part of it is providing clarity in terms of why we're doing what we do in the face of a lot of other changes. So, you know, some of those changes are technology. So as we have more AI and we have more machine learning, a lot of people have been asking before COVID, you know, what is it that makes us human? What's our unique human contribution. And part of that is aligned to purpose is, is understanding what it is that we uniquely do. You know, the gig economy the ability to work from anywhere enhanced by our increased remote capabilities makes us ask questions about, you know, well, why would I join this organization?

Stacia Garr (53:37):

What do I get, what am I contributing by joining this organization? And having a clear sense of purpose helps answer that question. So I think that there's all sorts of reasons that purpose will continue to be a thing. I think the bigger question though, is we'll the organizations who have clarified or reinforce their purpose through COVID remain as committed to it. Well, we still see the level of commitment that we've seen and, you know, it's easy for, for healthcare organizations, you know, we've, we have this purpose podcast that we're that we're putting out right now. And we've had, for instance, Medtronic and Johnson and Johnson on there, and it's easy for easier for them to clearly articulate their purpose, but will other organizations continue to do so. And I think that for some of them who really are clear on this and believe in, it absolutely will. You know, another interviewee was Rachel Fichter at S&P Global, and, you know, that's a financial services firm, and yet they have a very clear sense of purpose. So I think it'll be interesting to see if there's some drop-off but I think that the fundamental reason for a focus on purpose will not shift.

Dani Johnson (54:50):

I think just because of time, we're going to leave it there. We've gone a little bit over what we usually schedule for a Q and A, we really appreciate everybody who has participated, and we really appreciate those that sent these questions in, because that makes our life much easier. When do we have questions in the Q and A session. This we'll be providing a transcript and a recording to, to those who are members on the site. And if any of you have any follow-up questions or would like to discuss any of these further, or have ideas that weren't shared today, please, please, please reach out your questions and your comments make us smarter. Thank you so much.

Stacia Garr (55:23):

Thank You. Happy holidays!

The flurry of significant events in 2020 have built a sense of urgency to act for the greater good of humankind. As a result, we’ve seen innumerable organizations rise to the occasion — acting with a greater and broader purpose, serving many stakeholders, not just shareholders. We wanted to understand better what is happening now, what we can learn from purpose-driven organizations’ approaches in the past, and what HR’s role is in making organizations purpose-driven.

Click on the image below to get the full infographic. As always, we would love your feedback. If you have thoughts, please share in the comments section below!

 

The flurry of significant events in 2020 have built a sense of urgency to act for the greater good of humankind. As a result, we’ve seen innumerable organizations rise to the occasion — acting with a greater and broader purpose, serving many stakeholders, not just shareholders.

We wanted to understand better what is happening now, what we can learn from purpose-driven organizations’ approaches in the past, and what HR’s role is in making organizations purpose-driven. To that end, this report answers 4 questions:

• What is purpose, and how does it differ from other related terms (e.g., mission, vision)?
• What is HR’s role in creating a purpose-driven organization? What can it control and influence?
• What does the employee experience look like at a purpose-driven organization?
• What are some of the purpose-driven practices we’ve seen in response to significant current events?

This research is the culmination of more than 6 months of research, with updates and insights specifically targeted at organizations managing through COVID-19 and the social justice movements of 2020.

 

 

I couldn’t sleep last night. 

I kept reflecting on a conversation I had yesterday about school reopening and women’s workforce participation. I had said:

“In the next 10 days, we’re going to see a gigantic clash between family needs and women’s needs as professionals – and I’m pretty sure the latter one is going to lose out. We’re going to lose 20 years of women’s advancement as women have to make decisions that reduce their workforce participation to support at-home learning and childcare.”

Many others have raised the alarm on this, as reflected in truly excellent articles out there on the topic such as here,¹ here,² here,³ and here.⁴

However, as someone who researches what HR can do to improve how organizations manage and enable people, I feel a certain obligation to further underscore what’s happening and what HR might be able to do … RIGHT NOW.  

What’s happening

We know that:

Women are bearing the economic brunt of this pandemic, whether it be in lost jobs or handling childcare.

As a result, there’ll be a long-term consequence on their earnings and careers. Here are a few important statistics:

• Nearly 11 million jobs in the US held by women disappeared from February to May, erasing a decade of job gains by women in the labor force⁵
• In 2020, female unemployment reached double digits for the first time since 1948; the June unemployment rate for Latinas was 15.3% and for Black women it was 14%; for white men: 9%⁶
• About 8% of women who have been laid off have zero chance of being called back to the workforce, as compared with 6.4% of men; 4% expect to be called back but probably won’t be⁷
• Women are providing around 70% of the childcare during business hours, spending 40% more time watching their children than fathers in couples in which the parents are married and working full time⁸

As we look to the beginning of the school year, the overwhelming refrain seems to be that people need a very different setup from what they had last spring. As an interviewee in USA Today said:

“We can’t spend another school year or even another month doing things the way that we did it between March and June.”

Mara Geronemus, former big law firm lawyer now in private practice⁹ 

This is echoed by data, which show the drawbacks of the last school year and the need for a different approach:

• 73% of teachers felt successful teaching remotely during the pandemic, down from 96% during normal periods¹⁰
• 64% of parents were concerned about their children falling behind in school as a result of the pandemic¹¹
• Two-thirds of parents have changed their childcare since March; yet, as of June, 47% of parents said they’ll need to change their childcare arrangement again within the next 3 months – and an additional 30% anticipated within the next 6 months¹²

Given this, we’ll likely see some significant changes to work arrangements – with the exact changes becoming increasingly clear over the next 2 weeks as more schools announce their plans.

Whatever the changes are, it looks as though distance learning will be a part of them for the foreseeable future – and that will have significant repercussions for workers:

• Only 19% of parents prefer their children to return to school in-person full-time this year
• 75% of the 20 largest school districts are expected to be teaching fully online in the fall¹³
• More than 60% of working parents believe that carrying out distance learning from home will place an extremely difficult burden on their family¹⁴
• 22% of parents are unlikely to return to their same work situation or are unsure if they’ll return at all¹⁵

As in the spring, this burden is likely to disproportionately fall on women:

• Women in the UK were 47% more likely than men with children to have permanently lost or quit their jobs since February 2020 – a trend we can expect to continue in the US this fall¹⁶
• Of senior leaders who said that distance learning from home will place an extremely difficult burden, mothers are more than 1.5 times more likely to report they don’t intend to stay at their current employer for at least the next 12 months as compared with fathers¹⁷
• When women leave the workforce, they can expect to lose up to 3-4 times their annual salary for each year out of the workforce – which obviously compounds over the course of a career¹⁸

In summary:

The decisions that women and their families make over the next few weeks will have dramatic consequences for those women’s careers and, in turn, companies’ abilities to retain women throughout their organizations.

What HR can do

This is obviously a systemic problem, which should be addressed from a broader perspective. However, given this is unlikely to happen – especially not in the next few weeks – organizations need to put in place practices that will help women stay in the workplace while still caring for their children. Here are a few things HR can do right now to help:

• Support caregivers
• Adjust current talent practices to support flexibility
• Redesign future talent practices to create on-ramps back into the company

Support caregivers

As the good folks at Mercer mentioned in a webinar today,¹⁹ employers can support caregivers in 3 primary ways (see Figure 1):

• Flexibility at work
• Flexibility from work
• Caregiving benefits

Flexibility is absolutely critical to enabling employees to do their work and to ensuring retention of them. For example, a recent study showed that 92% of employees who strongly agree their “organization provides needed flexibility to work from home with children at home” intend to stay at their organization for the next year – compared to just 66% of employees who strongly disagreed with that statement.²⁰

The ability for parents to control when, where, how, what type of work, and with whom they work is very important to enabling them to work during this pandemic.

This type of flexibility could include schedule sharing, reduced schedules, or supplementing current work with additional resources to lessen the workload. Also, as noted, it’s also incredibly important to provide parents with additional leave and time–off during this pandemic to meet their families’ needs, similar to what Microsoft did with giving workers 12 weeks of parental leave due to school disruptions.²¹

There’s one additional type of flexibility, though, that’s important to consider and isn’t called out in Figure 1 – flexibility on role if an employee’s home situation requires them to have a different situation from before. Many articles are rife with examples of people having to make a choice between quitting and working in a situation from which they could contract COVID and bring it home to a health-compromised family member. Given the number of women in essential roles, this is a situation that has especially impacted them. With the current situation, leaders have an opportunity to reimagine how work gets done and being more flexible about who does it.

While a lot has been written about the first 2 types of flexibility (and I strongly recommend you listen to the Mercer webcast), I’d like to focus on the topic of benefits – especially childcare benefits –  as that seems to have the greatest opportunity for reimagination.

Just 6% of employers offered subsidized childcare at the beginning of 2020, with 19% of employers making emergency or backup childcare services available to employees.²²

According to a Care.com survey,²³ the most common employer-offered childcare resources are:

• In-center backup care options
• Access to paid platforms to find care
• In-home care options
• Cash subsidies for care
• Onsite childcare

The first 4 bulleted items are ones that companies can contract with external vendors to offer immediately. Also, in this era of “learning pods,” companies such as Swing Education are offering teachers to small groups of children,²⁴ which is something that companies could subsidize immediately.

The last bulleted option, onsite childcare, is one worth considering, though it can take more time to implement.

It’s an approach that’s served Patagonia especially well over the years, enabling the company to have a 100% retention rate of mothers.²⁵ This benefit has also been offered for a long time by Google as well as Cisco.²⁶ Of course onsite childcare would have to adhere to health guidelines, but it could represent an opportunity to “not waste a crisis” by providing a benefit that would help keep employees – especially women – in the workforce, but that could have long-term benefits by supporting parents in the workplace.

Interestingly, another Care.com²⁷ survey shows that respondents would trade many other benefits to get more childcare assistance, showing that offering this type of benefit isn’t necessarily a zero-sum game (see Figure 2).

I’m sure there are other benefits or types of flexibility you can think of to support women in the workplace – what suggestions do you have?  

Adjust current PM practices to support flexible remote working

While different talent practices have to come together to support flexible working, performance management (PM) – given its impact on promotion and compensation – is a critical one. We wrote about this topic extensively in our report, The Double-Double Shift: Supporting Women’s Performance Management During a Pandemic.

In that study, we identified 10 specific things organizations need to focus on to improve PM for women. We put those items into the 3 buckets of culture, capability of managers, and clarity (see Figure 3).

Of this list of 10, the most important ones right now are ensuring that employees have absolute clarity on the expectations of them and that managers are focused on outcomes – not inputs (such as time available electronically, speed of email response, etc.).

I’ve focused here on the role of PM in supporting women, but I know other talent management practices could help, too. Share what you’ve seen below:

Redesign future talent practices to create on-ramps back into the company

I hate to admit defeat before a good battle is fought, but in this case, I think it’s fair to say this: We are likely to lose a lot of good women from the workforce before COVID-19 is done – even if we implement all the practices above. The question then becomes:

How will we plan to bring these women back into the workforce in the future?

We know that it can be very difficult for mothers to return to the workforce.²⁸ If organizations want to get mothers back, they’ll have to design for them. Some ways to do this include the following (see linked HBR article for more details on most of these):²⁹

• Create returnships – These are opportunities that are 8 weeks to 6 months in length and allow returnees to refresh their skills and the organization to evaluate the candidates for permanent roles
• Hire returnees into permanent positions, with support – Provide returnees targeted coaching and mentoring to support them in the transition back to work
• Host events to welcome candidates – For example, Bloomberg offers a “Returner Circle” program, a 1-2 day event for preapproved applicants to learn about careers, receive coaching, and conduct exploratory interviews³⁰
• Provide benefits aside from just cash – As you can imagine, flexibility and childcare benefits will likely remain key
• Seek out talent sources that feature mothers – As we learned in our D&I tech research, a number of technology platforms can connect mothers to companies, such as The Mom Project and Mom Source Network, that can help create on-ramps for professional women into jobs

What other ideas do you have for how to help women come back to the workforce? Share them below: 

A personal call to action

I dislike the question, “What keeps you up at night?,” but I must say, this topic keeps me up at night. We need more women in leadership, for the sake of the success of our organizations, our societies, as well as women ourselves.

We are in a critical moment: The practices leaders put in place right now can help us avoid “losing” a generation of women leaders.

I hope that some of these suggestions help move you forward in thinking about how you will retain and promote women in your workforce.

If, for some reason, you’re not in a place to take action on the suggestions above, there’s at least one thing you can do:

Ask the mothers in your life how they are doing as they approach school reopening. Find out what they’re thinking, what they’re struggling with – and see if you can help in some way. And even if you can’t help, at least try to empathize.

In the conversation I had yesterday – the one that prompted me to write this blog – it helped just to hear that other person say (upon learning that I will be homeschooling my kids):

“That sounds tough. I’m sure it will turn a 12-hour day into a 16-hour day.”

I felt seen and heard. 

Which, when one is managing kids, home, and work all at the same time, is more than I feel like I get some days. And that’s enough to keep me – and many other women – going to the next day, and the one after that.

This week’s call was all about Gender and Performance. We started out the call with an introduction to our Leveling the Field and The Double-Double Shift research. Through this research, we found that the experiences in the workplace around performance are very different for women. These differences represent clear, systemic, significant disadvantages for women, resulting in a consistently unequal experience. We also researched how COVID-19 has changed the landscape even further for women, when many employees are working from home. From this call, you'll become more aware of the problem and learn strategies to address it in your organization.

Q&A call transcript

Introduction (0:00)

All right. We’re now being recorded. I’m Dani Johnson, one of the cofounders of RedThread Research. We started these Q&A calls because we realized that so many people have questions and they don’t get the opportunity to ask them or don’t have a relationship with us personally. And so we want to give them an opportunity to ask these questions and deep dive the research just a little bit more. So I’ll be sort of emceeing. You’ll hear a little bit from me and then Stacia, do you want to introduce yourself?

Yeah. So I’m Stacia Garr, cofounder of RedThread Research. And for the purposes of today, I’m the primary author on this study on gender and performance management. We’ve actually got two studies. I'll talk about why we have those and then we’ll have a wide-ranging discussion, based on what you all want to know about them – and anything else that we want to talk about relevant to the topic of gender, performance management, and COVID right now.

Overview: Leveling the field & double-double shift research (1:00)

So Stacia, why don’t you start with an overview of that research. I know we put together an infographic on it, and maybe we can just pop that up and show it really quickly. So as I mentioned, just a moment ago, what we have done is actually 2 pieces of research. So the 1st one is what’s called Leveling the Field, which you all can see the infographic for. And this was a piece of research that began out of a study that Dani and I did last year with Emily Sanders, where we were looking at some of the critical practices of performance management. We got through that study. I actually said to Emily, “You know what? I wonder if there’s a gender component to this research. Like if there’s something interesting happening with gender.” And Emily said, “Yeah, you know, usually it shows there aren’t that big of differences. When we look at, you know, scores and blah, blah, blah.” But we’ve actually at the same time, just finished a study on women and networks and technology. And I said, you know what, let’s go – just see what we can find.

And so what we found is actually what you see here at the bottom, which is that in our data set, women are 17% less likely to say their manager can effectively have difficult conversations, 16% less likely to say they have formal performance conversations, 14% less likely to say their organization has a culture of trust, and 8% less likely to say their environment facilitates information-sharing. There were actually a few other things, but these were kind of the highlights of what we found. And so I kind of think of that as the beginning of going up, like, you know, Alice through the looking glass where we went and we said, huh, well, we heard, we know, you know, in conversations that women tend to get less feedback and some of these other things, but what’s happening here more broadly.

And so we then went out and we did this incredibly large lit review, and found all of these studies about what was not working for women with performance management. And so we then said, okay, well, let’s put that in the context of the model that we just developed, which is what we did here. And so that model is really around 3 concepts of culture, capability of managers, and clarity. So this idea that those are the three factors that really drive high performance. And so we then said, okay, within each of those out levers, what should we be thinking about when it comes to women and gender? This is all great and good. We did this over the course of the winter. We were just about ready to hit publish on this study and then COVID blew up. And we said, well, this is probably not the time to talk about this. So let’s take a step back and let’s think about it a bit more.

And then we developed really the follow-on study, which is one we call, The Double-Double Shift, which is really kind of taking what we learned there with regard to culture capability of managers and clarity, and saying – right now we work from home in the pandemic – what does this mean? What should we be thinking about? So that’s kind of the big frame for how we got to where we are and these two studies in particular.

Thanks, Stacia. And just so you all know, you can access both of these infographics on our website and they should be accessible to anybody (Leveling the Field and Double-Double Shift), whether you’re a member or not, even though memberships are free right now. So feel free to access them and study them, and pull them up right now and ask questions about them, all that good stuff. Okay. So we’re going to start with a question that was asked online, and then again, please feel free to share your questions in the chat. We’ll answer those we prioritize first.

Why is gender & performance management important? (4:44)

So Stacia, why is this topic of gender and performance management so important, especially right now with COVID?

You can see here, I’m going to leave this up on this Double-Double Shift infographic, because I think that this does a really good job of highlighting why right now with COVID. So we know, and everybody is now starting to write about this. It’s kind of funny when we first started doing this work, not many folks were talking about it. Now we’ve got Melinda Gates today in foreign affairs writing about, you know, the impact of the pandemic on women and differentially. But, we know you know, for a lot of the women who are working at our organization, they’re taking on a much greater percentage of the housework, the childcare work. And a lot of that childcare work is actually coming during business hours. And so that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re doing a worse job at their jobs. We know that it just means that they tend to be doing it in chunks of time. And so those chunks of time – so not necessarily being accessible during every single moment of the traditional workday. We know overall, everyone is working longer hours, if you look at some of these work-from-home reports. But the fact that they may not be available every single moment of the day could lead to some unconscious biases that we know exist, even when we’re all in the workplace in a normal time. So, there’s a tendency for some of the things that we’ve found in the core report to be amped up.

So one of the most interesting findings that was in the study was if someone is a mother, whether that has an impact on their work. And not just the fact that somebody knows that they're a mother actually ends up with a bias kind of creeping in, and they tend to get recommended for difficult positions or difficult learning opportunities less often that can lead to, you know, promotion. And also you can kind of see a statistical impact on their performance scores. So you think about that then in a work-from-home environment where everyone can see, you know, like me, I’ve got my kids beautiful tower behind me. I think it can turn into a real challenging situation.

How has COVID-19 exacerbated the situation? (6:59)

So how much do you think it’s exacerbated? That’s what I wanted – exacerbated with COVID versus what was happening normally anyway. It’s hard to say I would, because I think that, you know, and we’re already hearing this and I’d love to hear what other people think, but we’re already hearing a lot of organizations saying, okay, well, we’re not sure what we’re going to do with performance. Like if we’re an organization that had scores in the past, you know, are we going to take the equivalent of what many schools did, which is just say, "Hey, everyone gets a pass."? This is a difficult time, whatever. So, so it’s, it’s unclear because I think we haven’t gotten to that point where a lot of organizations are going to give scores. But I think though, and, or I should say promotion opportunities because many organizations, you know, don’t have scores, but they still have to make decisions on how to promote people and the biases can come in there. So, I think it’s a little bit early to tell. But I do in terms of the actual impact on advancement, but in terms of how people are being treated.

I think, you know, we both know that there’s kind of two approaches. There’s the, "Hey, you’re an adult. We expect you to get your work done and we know you’re going to do it on your own." And I think that probably in those environments, women are probably doing, you know, comparatively fine. But in the environment where it’s been a lockdown, tell me everything you’re doing every minute of the day kind of approach. I think it’s probably turning out to be extremely difficult. I think it’s really interesting that you mentioned learning opportunities. I think sometimes we don’t necessarily include those when we think about biases. I do learning for RedThread and we are starting to sort of dig into that idea more and more. There are lots of opportunities that women are sort of passed over because they’re mothers or have responsibilities outside of work or perceived responsibilities outside of work that would make it more difficult for them to participate.

Can I add to that Dani? One of the things we wrote about in the first report though, is sometimes I think that the women are not necessarily pursuing those opportunities either for a range of reasons. So one might be just, you know, they don’t have access to the networks to learn about them. So it’s not that they’re actively being passed over where they just don’t know that opportunity exists, and so they’re not putting their hand up. The second is, particularly, you know if they have other responsibilities, whether those be childcare or eldercare or whatever it is, they may say, "Hey, you know what. I’m in a situation where my manager understands me, they’re flexible. Like we’re kind of good. Like why would I go and, you know, upend this Apple cart." And so that’s not to say that there wouldn’t be another manager who would be those same things, but they’ve kind of gotten themselves into a decent situation. And so there isn’t a real reason to advance because that would kind of upset everything else in their world. So those were some of the things we saw in the literature for us in terms of being other reasons people may not be pursuing these opportunities.

What are companies doing to reduce bias? (10:02)

That makes sense. And probably a little bit more now, just because everybody is so slammed with everything that’s going on. You mentioned biases and I wanted to go to a question that somebody asks about what companies are doing. You mentioned that a lot of companies are considering maybe not giving performance reviews this year. But the question is what are companies doing in performance calibrations to reduce bias?

Yeah. So, it’s an interesting question because there’s actually a whole bunch of things you should be doing before you even get to any sort of calibration session. Right. So one of the things I’m trying to remember yeah, so we actually had it right here. So only about 60% of organizations are being very clear about what the promotion criteria is. And we see similar things in terms of being very clear about what employees goals are. So, you know, if you think about at the end of whatever your period is, if you haven’t been very clear on what people are expected to achieve at the end, it’s very easy for biases to get in the way – because, you know, you didn’t know what you expected anyway, and you know, it all kind of falls apart when there’s no structure, I think is the point. So, there’s that aspect.

The other, you know, some of the other aspects, can we get into this here? I think on feedback is, you know, we need to make sure that there’s a range of sources of feedback so that, you know, the biases that the way that somebody has presented in a calibration session isn’t just based on a single person, but it’s based on a well-rounded perception. Similarly, frequency of feedback, we all know about all the biases that can come in because of feedback. And so making sure that you’re doing it more frequently can at least overcome some of those. So making sure all that happens before you actually get into the calibration session is super important. And then when you’re actually in the session, you know, having a thorough conversation about, okay, well, what are we basing this on? What’s the actual evidence of these things? You know, what’s an alternative interpretation of what may or may not have happened. And then, you know, kind of zooming out because you can’t do this on an individual level, but zooming out what are our patterns? Are we consistently rating a certain type of person at high potential high performance, whereas you’re consistently not reading other types of people? There’s some technology from actually SuccessFactors that'll allow you to do that – where you can take your 9-box and you can see by gender or by you know underrepresented minority status, whatever it is by age – you can see where people tend to fall on the 9-box. And then you can also, it’ll also pop up for your historicals. So this person for 3 years has been rated high performance, but medium potential, yet they’ve never been advanced. Is that okay? Maybe? I mean, maybe there’s good reasons for that, but maybe there’s not, so there can also be kind of a technological intervention.

But I think the strong practices and approach throughout the year, and then in the meetings themselves is your first line of defense. And the technology is kind of a flag for what may be happening that you may not be seeing. I like that. I like the idea of technology and data. You and I have talked a lot about how data is helping us make more informed decisions across the board, but especially when it comes to biases in diversity and inclusion, etc. We also had a conversation earlier this week where we wanted to sort of dive into this idea of high performance and leadership tracks, and all of these things that we tend to assign to employees when they’re fairly young and it just sort of follows them, which also biases them. I’m also fairly short of that. The way that those things are assigned probably will get biased and not necessarily based on data. So we plan on digging into that a little bit more. I think it’s a really interesting question.

What additional challenges do women of color face? (13:42)

We’re in a really interesting place in the world and in our country specifically right now, because we’re dealing with COVID, but we’re also becoming more aware of this idea of Black Lives  Matter (#BLM). One of the questions that we got was what challenges do women of color, especially leaders and managers, face and what do they need or want in order to solve those problems? Yeah, it’s a great question.

I think for someone to say, you know, it’s just because of homophily, it’s a little bit easier for me to answer the questions on gender than it is necessarily to extrapolate to color. And I am a little bit hesitant to do so because this research did not actually focus on people of color. So all that said, what we generally see in research is that what's happening for women because it tends to kind of be I would say the most advantaged of the underrepresented groups, what is happening for them just tends to be worse, particularly for women of color. Women of color tend to just, if you look at the statistics, they just end up being so much farther down it’s really, really heartbreaking. So, you know, what would I recommend just kind of giving all those caveats first, you know, is what we’ve done here in general, which is with this research, we just say that, look, if we do everything that’s in here, it’s going to raise everybody’s vote, right? If this has just meant much of it is just sound performance management practice. And that will enable us to make sure that we have better conversations throughout. So, it starts there – make it better for everyone particularly around fairness and feedback, and focusing on the development opportunities. So everything that we have here on this, in this culture bucket. So that’s where I would start.

I think then it is you know, moving on to capability of managers we have here, we talk about barriers in the report. We actually talk about visible, semivisible, and invisible barriers. And some of the invisible barriers and some of the visible and invisible barriers are the ones that are, I think, most likely to affect people of color. So things like it’s unclear to the extent which my manager support actively supports diversity, my manager doesn’t have the language to stand up for me when something happens that gets at diversity – so those are some of the things that are kind of in those semivisible or invisible barriers. And so we think that giving managers the language and the practice around how do you, if something is said, you know, something like a microaggression where someone makes some offhand comment, you know, not really appropriate, certainly not, you know appropriate if we’re trying to be kind and you know, the best version of ourselves for everyone.

What’s the language that managers should use? What’s the language that employees should use? How should they know that the manager knows that they’re saying the right things. So I think this is an opportunity for some of the virtual reality training that we’re seeing are some of these things that actually puts you in the moment, because I think that the problem’s not something you can read on a piece of paper. I’d never let that happen. I’d say, blah, blah, blah. But when you're in a moment where someone has said it, and it’s someone where there’s relationships you know, you need to have the right words and at least putting yourself in some sort of alternate reality that could give you a chance to practice. That may be a step in the right direction. But I think that issue of these semivisible and invisible barriers is where there’s likely the biggest opportunity for people of color. Again, saying that was not the focus of this research. That’s just me. Yeah, I think you’re right. I think there are parallels that can be drawn there. It has to do with decency and being human and all those good things. I’m interested.

What practices promote a good D&I culture? (17:44)

There’s a question here about culture and training. So we know that diversity and inclusion training has not been super successful in the past. We also know that some organizations are much better at developing a good culture around diversity and inclusion than others. What are some of the things that you’ve seen that promote this good culture and address kind of how do I know how to talk to about this with my coworkers or my manager, etc.? Yeah. So I think in the organizations that I’ve seen build a good culture, it has started in the recruitment process. It starts before anybody is actually ever a member of your company. This is who we are, this is what we do. This is what we stand for. And this is integrated into every aspect of how we engage with a candidate, how we assess the candidate, how we treat people, and then it continues on through the whole employee experience.

So you know, when you come into onboarding, how do you talk about it? You know years ago, I did a study where we talked about General Mills and I think General Mills is in many ways, just a remarkable story because they’re in a, shall we say, not very diverse area of the country, and yet they have some of the highest diversity of any organization that you can see. And part of the reason for that is they’ve built a culture that when you come into, for instance, onboarding, they say diversity is every single person in this room’s responsibility. And inclusion is everyone at belonging and equity. It is what we do and who we are. And that gets that expectation then filtered through everything in their leadership training. They’re learning, you know, as you talked about performance management, succession, everything. And so I think that is how you get there. It’s, you know, it’s the system that reinforces and yes, performance management, what we’re talking about today as part of it. But it's just one piece in that bigger, bigger picture – but it has to be deeply entrenched from the beginning.

Do existing approaches to feedback inhibit / help? (19:52)

Thank you. Let’s go into our next question. Do existing approaches to feedback enable achieving gender parity in the workplace? Yeah, so yes, it can, It can certainly inhibit, it can also certainly help. You know, you can see here on this one, we talk about analyzing performance feedback language by differences by gender. So, for instance, there’s a couple of technologies out there right now that will let you basically ship in all of your performance reviews and then analyze them for tone, for the type of language that’s used, etc. That technology and associated research has tended to find that the feedback that women are given tends to be more relational in nature and based on, you know, specific behaviors. So things like you did a really good job fostering that relationship with the customer. You’re very kind and open and warm, right? By contrast, the same, you know with a man, that feedback tends to be more you had to have a strong relationship, but that resulted in us being able to increase the revenue or the sales from this customer by 10%, this year – very tied to business outcomes very much so. The commentary on what happened, but then the business result and also the feedback tends to be in general about the things that actually drive business results versus some of the softer stuff. So this has been replicated in numerous studies.

So, you know, I’ve seen it from technology providers who have kind of shown me their data, but then I’ve also seen it a bunch of academic studies. So if you think about how should we be giving feedback, no one making sure that it is certainly behavioral, but then tied specifically to a business outcome. The second part of this is that the feedback to women tends to be a softer, so less critical feedback around the things that you need to do better and more of a kind of, yeah, just, well, you know, you did this thing well, good job keep doing that. And the research shows that when feedback is vague and nonspecific like that one, that it’s harder for women to improve, but two, it impacts their performance scores. Interestingly, if feedback is similarly vague and nonspecific for men, it does not have an impact on their performance. And when we look at some of the research behind why this might be the case. And some of that gets into this idea that women are, there’s a fear that women will be more emotional about the response. And so people can, and this is men and women. This isn’t just like, yeah, this is women as well. We’ll tend to not give that more critical feedback. And so I think, you know, how do we address that?

Create a feedback culture – creating an expectation. This is what we do. This is how we do it. We have unclear practices and language that we use, and this is the expectation. So that whoever’s coming into that feedback conversation isn’t letting in some bias around how this person’s going to respond, impact the quality of the feedback that they give to them. Because, you know, if people don’t get good-quality feedback, how are they going to improve? Right. So it becomes this reinforcing cycle. So that is the biggest. Second thing that we’ve found around feedback. I remember when we were doing it, one of our roundtables for responsible organization, one of the best pieces of advice I heard for that whole thing was learn how to give drive-by feedback. So instead of sitting down and having a formal meeting and making it a big deal to get feedback, learn how to just do a drive by, "Hey, you’re doing this wrong. Hey, can you fix this." Much more acceptable and create that feedback culture, and makes everybody aware that the feedback is what we’re trying to do here. Rob said that he watched a presentation about a women and feedback. The key message of the presentation is that men get feedback and coaching on business acumen and other very specific business related topics. Like you were saying, women more often get feedback on style. I’ve gotten it myself. And that pretty much aligns with pretty much everything that we’ve found in the research as well. It is what it is, but we can fix it. That’s exactly right. Rob – it’s in the longer report, a number of sources of research that supports that.

Do women giving feedback to women focus on style? (24:15)

Stacia, I’m curious. Do women giving feedback to women do the same thing? So it doesn’t matter who the giver is. The bias when the receiver is a woman is to focus on style. Yes. Hmm. That’s fascinating. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s interesting. We mentioned at the beginning, we also wrote this network report. We also find, you know, instances where you might think that when in their network are women, a woman manager with a woman direct report tends to support more – that isn’t necessarily the case. In fact, sometimes it can be the opposite case. So, it’s interesting. The what’s your intuition might be for how these relationships would order is actually not how it tends to work.

What is the best way to address D&I analytics? (25:02)

I wanted to read this question and a statement from Jennifer Beck, who’s attending. I find a lot of organizations are pointing to a single D&I number or group initiatives to a single program. One result is that outreach is sort of singularly focused. Hence real diversity is masked, i.e., an organization may have more women in positions of power, which is great, but women of color and other minority groups are still underrepresented. What is the best way you have seen organizations address this or at least in their D&I analytics?

Yeah. So Jennifer great question. I think that this is an area of real development. So we’ve been, as I think you, you may know, we do a lot of work on the people analytics side as well. And so we’ve been just kind of hammering this topic of D&I and people analytics, and we’re starting to see some movement historically though. I think the reason that we’ve seen this is that the EEOC requirements do not allow for things like intersectionality, right? Like there’s such a joke, those metrics. And so, we think that kind of this more sophisticated understanding is something that they've lacked. So that’s the historical perspective. Add onto that, a lot like the number of organizations I’ve talked to historically. I started doing research in this space in 2013, who just wouldn’t touch D&I metrics. They said, look, if we do it, we can get in legal trouble. If we know about it, like we’re just gonna get into it. Then we can have that deniability that is starting to change. And part of the way that it’s changing is one, certainly employees are demanding it, but two, quite frankly, the technology providers are making it a lot simpler to do it.

And so it’s gone from this mammoth undertaking as an organization to something that well, you know, actually literally, what was it last month? Workday just launched a D&I analytics thing and we were on a call with them. I was on a call with them earlier this week. And I said, I think this may be one of the biggest things that drives change here, because if you have to make an additional investment to do this thing, which could be perceived as risky, I’m probably not going to do it. But if it’s right there in your Workday module and you can get these analytics and you can do exactly what you’re saying, because you can filter, you know, to the nth degree because now these analytics packages enable you to do that. You’re going to start to get these answers. So, you know, what do they do? I think, you know, some of it, and I’m not promoting Workday because there’s others, obviously who do that, I’m just mentioning it. Cause they’re  so widely used in the industry. But I think that getting access to the metrics saying that, you know, particularly right now with Black Lives Matter, if you think this is important, let’s go and look, we can do it. And then, you know, D&I partnering with people analytics, because right now that partnership is not nearly as strong as you might think, partnering with them to say, okay, what can we actually see? And not just representation numbers, cause representation numbers are, you know, such a lagging indicator. But, you know, are women of color having conversations? What map your diversity demographics over your engagement data? What did women of color say about their trust in the organization about, you know, the quality of the feedback they’re getting and really started to dig into that. But yeah, I think, you know, I have real concerns about singular color diversity, you know, indices. They certainly have some value, but they’ve masked a lot.

But I think the real real story is where we can now get with these sophisticated analytics, which is at these individualized levels. So I’m not sure if that fully answers the question, but that’s kind of what I’m seeing. I think part of the challenge is collecting the data, right? I mean, I work for some organizations that are international that are not allowed to collect some of that data. And so it’s sort of like, what’s the point of measuring inclusion if you’re not allowed to measure inclusion of or cut the data by different demographics like that? Well, I think that’s why gender has been such a hot topic because that is something everyone can collect where, you know, that the ethnicity question is one that is uniquely American. Thank you.

Which formula do you use to represent a D&I index? (29:31)

Yeah. Kind of going along with that, we have a submitted question, which index or formula do you use to represent a diversity and inclusion index? When that question came in, I kind of, as I’m laughing, I laughed, then I laughed now. I mean, there’s so many of them, you know, it’s hard to, I don’t really have a perspective on which one’s better, you know, or because I think that there’s strengths in all of them. And there’s also weaknesses, like we were just saying with Jennifer. But I think, you know, what’s important is to make sure that you are getting a robust set of questions that look at not just diversity, but also inclusion, belonging, and equity that you make sure that you’re asking that regularly and that you’re following up on it. Pretty much, not every, but many of the engagement experience providers today have an index. You can certainly add your own questions onto them. But I think it really just, you know, starts with that foundation, build on it and then go with what seems to work for your organization.

Yeah. I think that last point, they should go with what seems to work for your organization is a really important one. Everybody’s got different challenges. We’re all trying to settle diversity and inclusion, but it’s different for every single organization. And it isn’t really what you can cheat off your neighbor. In this case, you need to figure out kind of what works for you and your organization.

What was surprising about the research? (30:49)

I’ve got a question here asking what you thought was the most surprising thing about the women and performance research. So there were a number of surprising things that overall, Dani, as I told you, when we were doing the research, it was most, it was largely depressing. I’d have to step away from it for a few days and then come back to it. To the extent to which it was depressing by that has been most surprising. But I think kind of the one nugget that I took away that I hadn’t really fully considered, and this is in the main report in the Leveling the Field report was a study on rating scales. And I’m sure Rob will get a lot of this one.

Then there was a study that was done. It was in a university setting where they took professors and they looked at what their scores had been on a 10-point rating scale. And so it was this same group of professors who had delivered things, who had delivered this, you know, similar content. It was the same class, but they all kind of get in their own slightly different way. When he was on a 10-point rating scale, women were much less likely to get the top score than men, like hardly any women got it. The university decided to switch their rating scale for students for these professors down to a 6-point rating scale. And when they did that the likelihood of women and men getting the top rating now with 6 was equal. The teaching didn’t change. The content didn’t change, nothing changed. The only thing that changed was the rating scale. And so they started to then dive into why that might be the case.

And in many cultures, our own included, there is a perception that a 10 is perfection and perfection is something that is heretical in our culture, very difficult for women to achieve. And so when you shifted it from this 10-point scale to the 6-point scale, and it wasn’t this idea, you know, you think about it even like with what gymnastics or skating, you know, like the 10, the perfect it’s amazing, but there was no longer that perception. And so it was much easier to give people, give women that 6-point scale. And so that to me, and certainly there’s an argument, you know, Oh, well, you’ve reduced some of the gradation, blah, blah, blah. But I don’t think it really holds water.

I think that this point around the perception of what the top rating means is important. So you then translate that to our organizations. You might say, well, that seems maybe not so, so connected because most of us have a 5-point rating scale, blah, blah, blah. I would ask, what does a 5 mean in your organization? Does a 5 mean perfection? And if a 5 means perfection, you’ve probably got the same problem.

How do I help women be heard better? (33:50)

Interesting. Kind of along the lines of well, perfect. Well, the next question has to do with women being heard. So there’s a perception in organizations that women aren’t listened to or heard as much as men. And the question is how do I help women in my organization be heard better? I think, you know, there’s certainly a few things. One is an education and an awareness that this is happening – and we’re seeing some of that happen with some of the implicit bias training. I have lukewarm feelings about implicit bias training, but raising awareness is I think generally a good thing. And that probably comes there.

I think second is to build in practices and accepted phrasing about what happens when somebody gets overrun, you know, somebody might notice that it happens, but they don’t know what, how to handle it. So, you know, teaching, even in leadership, I’m most likely, quite frankly, in leadership programs or in manager programs, you know, you’ve observed something happen. Here’s what you say, like literally, "Oh, that looks like a point that Dani just made. Dani, could you maybe build on that even if somebody else has kind of jumped on and restated what was said?"

I think another thing is to be aware of and this isn’t just for women, but to be aware of different communication styles. Some people are just not that thrilled about jumping into the middle of the fray. And that’s exacerbated in our zoom world, right? Like we’re kind of in this weird world where the person talking now has this green box around their face and everybody gives attention. And so it can feel uncomfortable to jump in and have that dialogue. And if there’s a preset pattern of a certain type of person who is the one in the green box, that’s only gonna get exacerbated. So, building in kind of an expectation. We saw this, Dani, on our roundtable – we saw it was really interesting. We thought that once we got to a certain group side, there was a tendency for the women to kind of shrink back and for the men to dominate the conversation. In these roundtables, we have what I think it was around 12 to 15 people on a zoom call where that happened. And you know, the way that we kind of address that the next time is we actually just said, okay, we’re going to do lightning round robin, answer the question in two sentences. And then we move on to the next person. So again, that’s just a practice and accepted practice that this is what we’re going to do, and that makes sure everybody’s heard. So those are just a couple ideas that I’ve seen. I’m sure there are lots of others out there and if others can add that. That’d be great. Rob, I see you just asked about the name of that study. I’ll pull it out of the report and send it to you, or you can get it out of the report, but what we can not do that in follow up. We’ll stick it on the same page as the recording as well for everybody else.

I also wrote a study just about women being heard for Brigham Young University earlier this spring about this – was fascinating to me, partly because it’s my alma mater, but it was really interesting. They were trying to figure out why women weren’t speaking up. And they found that when they made the majority of the group women – so the groups were generally five people – when it was four women and one man, women tended to speak out much more. The other thing that they did is they changed the way that they made decisions. So, in most organizations, it’s majority rules or the person who has the most authority makes that decision in these groups. They forced them to make them by unanimity which I thought was really interesting. And as soon as, you know, unanimity changed, even if there was a mixed group, though, the ability and the likelihood that women would speak up changed – it was really interesting. I felt similarly, so you and I went to very different undergrads, but I went to a woman’s college. And when I went to grad school, I was just shocked. I looked around and I was like, why are you not talking? Why is that quiet? And obviously that trend has continued in the line of work I went into. But it was, and I think for me, it was because I was in undergrad, surrounded by women and we all had to talk. No one was going to talk if the women didn’t talk. So I think I’ve kind of built in a habit of leadership in the habit of just, yeah, just doing that. And so that’s been an interesting observation, quite frankly, since I graduated college.

What is the one finding to take away & implement? (38:34)

I know we are. Okay. So Rob says similar experience for him working near the gap, 73% women. Interesting. okay. A couple more questions. I know we’re nearing the end of this meeting and we have about four minutes left. So anybody who’s on the phone that wants to ask a question, please get it in. One of the questions that came in was I’ve read your study. I’m really interested in the one takeaway you would like us to what’s the word I’m looking for? Paraphrasing your roots, the one thing that they think that they should take away and implement into the organization. Yeah, here, I’m just gonna pull up the key findings so that we can look at the same thing.

I think the number one finding is that while performance. Okay, I’m going to give you three. I know you wanted one, but this is different experience for women. Like I don’t think that it’s, there’s just a ton of research out there. You know, if you start where I did, which was a little bit skeptical after doing this work, I am completely convinced that it is a different experience than something we need to address is. It’s especially a different experience here with COVID-19, that’s number one. Two, though, is if we do some of these changes that we recommend – increasing the quality of feedback, giving more training on how to give feedback, helping people understand how to articulate, you know, objections when incorrect language is being used, or people that are being treated unfairly. We do all those things. Everyone benefits, women benefit, men benefit, people of color benefit, everyone benefits. So while the initial effort might be to advance more women or people of color, everyone’s going to do better. I think the third thing would just be, and this is adjacent to this, but look into your learning opportunities. I think that’s a big source of some of this. Ultimate unfairness is, you know, performance is obviously connected to learning opportunities and for a whole host of reasons, women aren’t getting an equal shot at those. And so there’s a big opportunity there, and that is I think, a relatively no one’s going to say you shouldn’t do that. You know, we know that the more gender diverse, the more diverse period. Teams tend to perform better. If there’s financial data, there’s a financial imperative to do this. If we know that impacts financial data. So go there.

How much will tech help with this problem? (40:55)

Final question. How much will tech help us relieve this problem in the future? I think the value of tech here is twofold. One is that it can help us identify patterns that we didn’t know existed. So when people say don’t do that, and then you can have an objective way of looking at data and saying, yes, actually we, all of us do this. And you do your manager as an individual. Here’s your own track record. And that’s not somebody else with a bias perspective saying that that’s based on data. I think that is a significant benefit of tech. Number one. Number two is because so many things happen within critical decisions get made in technology systems. I think that the ability to highlight what’s happening at the moment of decision-making is really important. So it’s that heightened awareness, but then the awareness in the right moment, the combination of those two, I think has real power. But, ultimately, we’re people. This is an incredibly complex people problem, and tech's not going to save us – it’s going to help us, but it’s not going to save us. And that’s true in pretty much anything having to do with people. It can inform us to help us make better decisions, but it’s not a silver bullet – ever.

Alright, I think we’re gonna leave it there. Thank you for everybody that joined us live and thank you for those who submitted questions online. It made this a really fun conversation. We will send the link to this recording to everybody that was on live, as well as anybody who submitted a question. And then we’ll be posting this live on our website, hopefully in the next week, so that you can go right to the question you have an answer for. That’s it. Thank you so much.

Women are having a different work experience during the current COVID-19 pandemic, which is something leaders need to take into account as they update performance management practices. This infographic summarizes our report on this topic, The Double-Double Shift: Supporting Women's Performance Management During a Pandemic.

Click on the image below to get the full infographic. As always, we would love your feedback. If you have thoughts, please share your comments in the Feedback section on the right!

 

As leaders, one of the things we most want to create is an environment in which the people who work with us – regardless of who they are – have equal opportunities to advance. Yet, collectively, we're failing at this. Though women and men enter the workforce in equal numbers and are equally competent, on average, men hold more managerial positions (62%) than women (38%). While a variety of reasons may exist for these different percentages, one factor flies under the radar in many organizations, even though we know it influences both promotion and compensation decisions: performance management (PM).

Our research on performance management revealed, like so many others have found before us, that men and women have different experiences with it, resulting in women experiencing systemic inequality. This is despite changes to make PM more “modern.”

Before COVID-19 was even a thing, we undertook a holistic study of women and performance management to understand:

• Are the changes to modern performance management practices resulting in women and men having the same experience?
• And, if not, then what are the differences and what can organizations do about them?

The resulting study, Leveling the Field: Making Performance Management Work for Women, was ready for publication in mid-March – just as COVID-19 took over everyone’s worlds. Instead of publishing a study that would get drowned out in the craziness of the times, we held on to it. But then we decided we could – and must – adapt what we learned in Leveling the Field to fit our current moment.

The result is The Double-Double Shift: Supporting Women’s Performance Management During a Pandemic, which presents a very realistic look at how the COVID-19 global pandemic is impacting the ways women are perceived during this new work-from-home environment, as well as the additional challenges they now face. In this second study, we focus on questions such as:

• How might the unconscious biases women already face worsen in – and be mitigated by – a long-term work-from-home environment?
• Given what we know about how to make PM more equitable for women, how might we alter our practices in this current environment to level the playing field?
• How can leaders address these challenges now, before less effective practices solidify in this new working environment?

We are publishing both studies together, as we think they each represent timely and useful insights for our readers. The Double-Double Shift is very targeted at what is happening right now, pulling some of the most relevant information from Leveling the Field, and augmenting it with COVID-19 and work-from-home specific details. Leveling the Field is our original report, and has a lot more overall details and suggestions to consider. We think readers will find value in reading both, and leveraging the self-check assessments and “getting started” suggestions.

Please reach out to us at [email protected] with any questions, comments, or suggestions. If you would like an infographic summary of Leveling the Field, click here.

If you would like an infographic summary of The Double-Double Shift, click here.