Could the Next 10 Days Be More Critical to Women’s Advancement Than the Last 20 Years?
Posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2020 at 6:54 PM
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.
Gender & Performance – Q&A Recording
Posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2020 at 7:35 PM
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, Performance Management & COVID-19
Posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2020 at 10:04 PM
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.
Leveling the Field: Making Performance Mgmt Work for Women
Posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2020 at 9:28 PM
Before COVID-19 was even a thing, we undertook a holistic study of women and performance management (PM), to understand a few key things:
- Are the changes to modern PM 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 a sister report, 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.
Many of the leading modern PM practices just need to be amplified and augmented to create a more level playing field. Organizations don’t have to reinvent modern PM to make it fairer; they just need to make it the best version of itself.
Please reach out to us at [email protected] with any questions, comments, or suggestions.
The Double-Double Shift: Supporting Women’s Performance Mgmt During a Pandemic
Posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2020 at 7:23 PM
Before COVID-19 was even a thing, we undertook a holistic study of women and performance management (PM). 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 a sister report, 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?
To improve women’s experiences of performance management, leaders must first understand there’s a difference that needs to be addressed – and, critically, that it still needs to be addressed even under the current trying times. Much of this report is dedicated to outlining where and how these different experiences occur for women, and diving more deeply into how they might be exacerbated and addressed when women are working remotely.
Please reach out to us at [email protected] with any questions, comments, or suggestions.
A Small Step in a Much Longer D&I Journey
Posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2020 at 10:26 PM
It goes without saying that the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent protests have laid bare the significant race-based differences prevalent in American society. Unfortunately, despite many leaders’ best efforts, those differences don't stop when people pass through the doors of corporate America.
We all know that diversity and inclusion (D&I) is important to business outcomes. But, even more, it's critical to our humanity. Seeing and respecting others for everything they bring – and ensuring that everyone feels safe, valued, respected, and like they belong – is a critical part of a human environment, not just a work environment.
Why we care
Given everything that's happening, there's an even greater need to bring all of our resources to bear on understanding and improving diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging in companies today.
Responses from corporations with statements supporting the protests against racism have been swift and numerous. However, only a small fraction of those have been turned into actions by taking tangible steps. Companies, such as Goldman Sachs, Lego, and Cisco12, donated millions to charities to help fight racism and inequality, but there's still much that remains to be done to improve levels of diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging within organizations.
Aware of this heightened call to action, we're undertaking our 2020 update to our D&I technology research. While we recognize technology is only one part of how leaders can address the underlying challenges within their organizations, it's still an important part.
In particular, technology can help identify patterns that may not have been previously known to exist, determine areas that need to be worked on, heighten awareness at critical decision points, and provide predictive data that can guide better insights for the future.
How you can participate
We invite you to participate in our research if you are one of these 3 groups:
- Customers of D&I tech vendors. If your company uses D&I technology in any form, we’d love to hear about your experience in our short 5-7 minute poll at danditech.com. Below is a list of companies previously included in our research (any of which might be one of your vendors) that you can give us feedback on. If your vendor isn’t on there, tell us which they are and give us your feedback – we'll track them down to get the other information we need from them.
- D&I tech vendors who participated in our 2019 research. Your company should have already received an email informing you of the detail of our process and inviting you to take our survey. If you haven’t received this email, send us a note at [email protected].
- D&I tech vendors who have not yet participated in our research. If you think you should be included, send us an email at [email protected], explaining your solution and why you think you should be part of the study. We'll get back to you as soon as we can.
When we launched our first D&I tech study, it was in the midst of the #MeToo movement. We are at the beginning of another movement that also requires our utmost commitment. Our fervent hope is that our work – when combined with the good work of so many of you – will help move the dial on the inequities we see all around us. Thank you in advance for taking yet another step on this long journey to drive necessary, critical change.
People Analytics Tech: Rising to the Occasion
Posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2020 at 11:02 PM
Lately, we've witnessed the people analytics (PA) community come together rapidly to support organizations as they navigate their way through the COVID-19 crisis. Through this blog, we share the resources and tools currently being offered by the vendors to help individuals, leaders, and organizations.
While we've done our best to provide the most current updates, we know that things are moving at a very fast pace. We're all learning every day (hour?!) of new needs, so expect vendors’ approaches to evolve rapidly. We'll do our best to keep this list updated, but the best source will always be the vendors themselves.
People analytics & their resources for the pandemic
We cover the PA vendors and the resources they offer based on the categories in our 2×2 people analytics technology framework:
- Employee coaching
- Employee engagement / experience
- Multisource analysis platforms
- Organizational network analysis (ONA)
- Learning analytics
- Text analytics
- Labor market analysis
At the end of this discussion, we include a corresponding text chart for each of the 7 PA tech categories to let you know Who is doing What, plus any pertinent Additional Details (see Appendix 1).
Employee coaching: Understanding what’s changed since COVID-19
Some of the themes and focus areas in this category include employee behaviors, work life balance, and empathy. We were particularly impressed by the resources being offered by Cultivate for individuals to become more self-aware. Self-awareness can be a critical strength when navigating work from home and conducting digital communications exclusively with colleagues for the first time.
Employee engagement / experience: Determining what to prioritize during the crisis
One of the major priorities for organizations during this crisis has been keeping their remote workforce engaged and ensuring a positive employee experience. Vendors have stepped up to help provide tools and resources that focus on employee listening, communications, well-being, transparency, collaboration, and productivity.
There are 3 things that stood out to us in this category:
- Resources and tools to help managers. As a bridge between senior leadership and employees, managers are playing critical roles in guiding, communicating, and motivating their teams during the crisis. Several vendors such as 15Five, Peakon, Glint, Limeade, Perceptyx, and Betterworks Engage (formerly Hyphen) are offering such resources.
- Crowdsourcing ideas. Going beyond the senior management to include the voices from employees and encourage them to share their ideas can not only drive engagement but can also help improve communications and make employees feel that they are all in this together. One of the vendors doing this actively is Medallia.
- Preparing to return to the workplace. Vendors such as Qualtrics and Perceptyx are offering surveys that allow organizations to understand how and when employees should return to work by assessing their confidence levels and their sentiments.
Multisource analytics platforms: Understanding the impacts of COVID-19
Vendors in this category are helping organizations integrate and manage the new data they are collecting to track the crisis, and its effect on the workforce, and to conduct advanced analyses such as “what-if” analysis and scenario planning.
Two things that stood out to us from this category were:
- Integrating new data and conducting advanced analytics. Overall, vendors such as CruncHR, One Model, Vemo Workforce, and PeopleInsight are working as thought partners to help businesses strengthen their data infrastructure and management, and to identify the analysis needed to support the business.
- Combining workforce data with COVID-19 data for holistic analysis and surfacing future projections. Visier is offering its customers the ability to compare workforce data with publicly available COVID-19 data all within their solution giving them the ability to see different peaks and future projections for the pandemic for different geographies.
Organizational network analysis (ONA): Identifying & leveraging connections during the crisis
Even before the pandemic, fostering a culture of teamwork and collaboration was among the top challenges and concerns for employers. The crisis brought on by COVID-19 has only made this challenge more pressing as organizations transitioned to remote working. Vendors whom we heard from are focused on helping organizations with issues of connectivity, isolation and overall organizational health during the crisis.
The 2 things we wanted to highlight in this category are:
- Combating isolation during remote work. Vendors such as Polinode are working to help their customers collect data and identify individuals through ONA that are at most risk of isolation and those that are well connected and can be leveraged for proactive outreach.
- Identifying the changing drivers for productivity. Vendors such as Innovisor are offering resources that can help customers understand the change in key drivers that affect productivity.
Learning analytics: Providing resources to learn during the crisis
Areas of focus under this category include providing organizations and individuals with online learning resources such as videos, guides, and activities to help them understand mental health, and cope with anxiety and isolation.
One interesting resource that we wanted to highlight in this category is the partnerships leveraged by MLevel which can make critical learning resources on well-being accessible to a wider community.
Text analytics: Understanding what employees need during COVID-19
Advanced text analytics such as multi-language semantic text understanding can be especially crucial in times of crisis to really understand the challenges employees are facing and share ideas on new ways of working. Since traditional text classification models are not enough to capture employee engagement during times of unprecedented crisis, vendor OrganizationView is working with customers to build new text classification models.
Labor market analysis: Developing a plan for the new normal
While on one hand the crisis has been particularly hard for individuals who have been let go from their roles as organizations cut back, on the other hand, are institutes and businesses who found themselves on the frontline helping with the crisis and needing to hire quickly to meet the growing need for extra work.
Labor market data has been crucial in bridging the gap between the two. Vendors such as Eightfold AI and EMSI have been leveraging this data to match people to the jobs in companies that are hiring, helping them highlight the crucial skills, and sharing the labor market data broadly to help businesses plan and prepare.
Looking ahead
As some parts of the world are starting to look toward reopening and retuning workers to the workplace, people analytics tech providers are beginning to support “return to workplace” efforts through surveys and insights to measure the level of readiness and sentiment of the workforce. Beyond technology providers, we are also hearing from consulting providers who are creating support kits and helping customers think through their new strategies.
For example, Aon recently launched a tool, the Talent Impact Modeler, that aims to help companies plan for various impacts on their talent and including furloughs, compensation planning, shift planning, and attrition and retirement. As more and more areas recover from the pandemic, we foresee a shift as people analytics technology will move from being used to help organizations react and respond to plan for and adjust to the new normal.
Thinking about the future, issues such as trust, transparency, and well-being, which have risen to the top during the crisis, will assume a more permanent place among the top objectives for organizations if they want to be better prepared in the future to face similar crises.
Additionally, the crisis forced organizations to shift their focus to identify work and tasks that are essential to keeping the business going and the skills required to get that work done. This will affect and bring about a significant shift in the thinking and how organizations approach work moving forward. We foresee organizations giving greater attention to growth and development of skills needed for work essential to the business.
People analytics is well positioned to not just support but take a lead in helping businesses achieve these objectives. Given how the vendor community has risen and come together in this time of need during the crisis, we think they will be well positioned to continue playing a crucial role in providing the necessary capabilities and tools needed to help leaders in the future.
Appendix 1: PA tech providers by category
Employee Coaching
Employee Engagement / Experience
Multi-Source Analysis Platforms
Organizational Network Analysis
Learning Analytics
Text Analytics
Labor Market Analysis
Figure 1: Employee Coaching | Source: RedThread Research, 2020.
Employee engagement / experience
Who | What | Additional Details |
---|---|---|
|
The vendor offers technology as well as learning resources on its platform such as courses, certificates, and lessons for leaders and managers to help with the transition to remote work. |
|
|
||
|
The resources are categorized on the website under themes such as supporting teams, working remotely, health information, and crowdsourced ideas to allow for quick reference based on specific needs. |
|
|
The resource center is updated on an ongoing basis and is comprised of blogs, webinars, articles, toolkits, and guides. |
|
|
The nudges contain short suggestions to help people better work from home and navigate uncertainty. |
|
|
The vendor is working to help its customers increase communication, preventing turnover and declines in performance due to anxiety. |
|
|
The product is working on helping organizations improve communications. The vendor is also offering tips and advice through their blogs that can be helpful for organizations working on transparency, trust, and well-being, |
|
|
The vendor is offering a number of their tools free for a 60-day trial. In addition, the vendor is also offering blogs and webinars that share best practices and advice around employee experience. |
|
|
The survey questions aim to help organizations understand the overall well-being of their employees. Insights from global data collected by the vendor reveal that while in mid-March 1.5% of all weekly employee comments globally were about the virus, a month later, 3.5% of weekly comments were about the virus. It also shows that the proportion of global employee comments related to well-being was 51% higher in March than it was in February. Additionally, manager response and acknowledgement rates to COVID-19 related comments were far higher than average, at 7% and 15% respectively, reflecting higher engagement from managers in March. |
|
|
The vendor has made the recordings of all their webinars publicly available on their website. In addition to the several surveys, the vendor is also offering action planning guides to be used once the surveys are completed. |
|
|
The vendor is currently offering all of its solutions free for all organizations. In addition to these, the vendor is also offering additional resources such as blogs, articles, and advice on their website on how to build a positive employee experience during the crisis. |
|
|
Press Ganey, a health-care company, acquired the employee engagement vendor SMD in December 2019. The company has numerous resources that are freely available on its website. |
|
|
The vendor has been working with their customers to leverage anonymous data from productivity tools such as Slack, Office 365, and G suite to assess the impact of change on their workforce and support them. The data provides insights into the levels of employee engagement, productivity, and collaboration at the macro level. |
Figure 2: Employee Engagement / Experience | Source: RedThread Research, 2020.
Multisource analysis platforms
Who | What |
Additional Details |
|
The research, which is based on the findings from the survey, is aimed at providing insights on what employers can do to keep employee productivity and engagement up. By end of April, the research had received almost 700 respondents. Some early insights revealed that on average, 66.8% of home workers are (very) worried about the economic situation: millennials (64.8%) less than older employees (71.9%) – and women (70.7%) more than men (64.7%). Additionally, personalized interventions to help employees, instead of a one-size fits all approach, are more effective. |
|
|
The vendor is working with customers to help them integrate new data sets containing COVID-19 tracking data, employee survey results, and work from home data in a few hours to allow reporting in a quick manner. They have created employee level dashboards to assist employees and managers in reducing leave balance hotspots. |
|
|
||
|
The vendor has seen their customers increasingly leverage their scenario planning tools to conduct what-if analysis to answer questions around forecasting attrition, retirements changing, and hiring volumes. The tool is also being used by customers to understand if they have business areas that are constrained by COVID-19, how and where can they manage this by managing external and internal attrition, instead of workforce reductions, and whether they should launch any voluntary reduction of hours or leave programs. They are also working with some customers to make sure they are coding leaves of absences and voluntary turnover by COVID-19 change reasons. |
|
|
The vendor is offering a whole suite of crisis management resources that include guides, demos on how to leverage their solutions during COVID-19, and alerts and advisories. It is also extending a managed COVID-19 data set for open use via GitHub which is refreshed daily to assist with employee safety, crisis management, and workforce planning scenarios. |
Figure 3: Multisource Analysis Platforms | Source: RedThread Research, 2020.
Organizational network analysis / ONA
Figure 4: Organizational Network Analysis / ONA | Source: RedThread Research, 2020.
Learning analytics
Figure 5: Learning Analytics | Source: RedThread Research, 2020.
Text analytics
Figure 6: Text Analytics | Source: RedThread Research, 2020.
Labor market analysis
Who | What |
Additional Details |
|
The platform, supported by McKinsey & Company, is being offered free of charge during COVID-19. The platform can also be used by organizations who have had to furlough their employees to communicate with them so they can rejoin when things are back to normal. |
|
|
Figure 7: Labor Market Analysis | Source: RedThread Research, 2020.
Responsive Orgs: Lens 2 – Distributed Authority
Posted on Saturday, April 18th, 2020 at 7:50 PM
The second layer of our Model for Responsiveness is DISTRIBUTED AUTHORITY. Our research indicates that responsive organizations empower employees to make decisions affecting their work, which enables collaboration and effective responses to market needs.
In this roundtable, we gathered a diverse group of global leaders for a discussion around the second layer in the Responsive Organization model.
Distributed Authority happens when organizations change the way their authority structures work. Instead of holding decision-making centrally (as most organization in the last 100 years are apt to do), authority to make decisions is spread throughout the organization, in all functions, and in all levels. Responsive organizations understand that, in order to respond to external pressures, people at the edges of the organization are often better equipped to make educated decisions about how to get things done.
3 areas of distributed authority
Distributed authority mindmap
Distributed authority roundtable video recap
Roundtable summary & leader advice
In the following sections, we expound on these 3 areas and highlight the good advice we heard at the roundtable.
Decision-making rights
Decision-making rights is the control employees have about how they execute their role or their responsibilities. We found that decision-making rights vary greatly by organization, manager, level, and sometimes even industry.
Advice from leaders:
- Defer to expertise, not title. During crisis, there is often an unconscious “because I said so” attitude from managers. We get it. Lots of people feel powerless and are looking to salvage some sense of order. However, one of the best pieces of advice shared was that organizations should default to expertise, not title. Let the person with the most information make the decision on the thing.
- Implement decision-making logs. One leader said that her senior leaders (C-suite) had instituted a process wherein they published the decisions they made and the reasons for those decisions. We like this idea for a couple of reasons. First, it establishes a level of transparency that we think is healthy during a crisis and helps everyone become comfortable with those decisions. Secondly, it’s an excellent learning tool. Not only are the decisions public, but the reasons why those decisions were made are also public, teaching employees the subtle art of decision-making.
- Throw out the 9-5. We have mentioned this in previous roundtable readouts, but it bears repeating. The world has gone mad. Employees are dealing with children and/or parents, lack of schedule, feelings of isolation, and a host of other challenges. This is an excellent opportunity for organizations to determine what’s important and what is not. Is it important that an employee is sitting at their desk and available for 8 hours straight everyday? Are the processes that have been followed for years really necessary? Or is the fact that work is actually getting done and deadlines are being met more important?
Diverse & engaged teams
The power of diverse thinking and inclusivity has been well-documented over the years, and not surprisingly, our responsive organization research backs that up. We know that organizations with diverse thought and inclusive behaviors do better – from higher engagement scores to more innovation – than their less inclusive-minded counterparts. We also know that diverse thought and inclusive behavior leads to more responsive organizations – allow them to react more quickly to external threats and opportunities.
Advice from leaders:
- Take advantage of the sense of humanness happening right now. Leaders mentioned that there is now more inclusivity and shared responsibility to carry the load and help each other out. Some leaders mentioned they had seen teams pull in people who are relevant, but not central, to disperse feelings of isolation. They also mentioned the need of leaders to be open and vulnerable about what they didn’t know so that others felt safe to do so as well.
- Leaders, create opportunities for contribution. Leaders mentioned ideas to help employees feel included – particularly those who may be more introverted and less likely to speak up. Ideas included: sending detailed agendas, complete with challenges to be discussed and decisions to be made, so that everyone had an opportunity to think about how they could contribute; being aware of those not actively participating in discussions, and encouraging them, either with back channel communication, or gentle verbal prompts, to share their ideas; establishing that there are no bad ideas; emphasizing that we’re all in this together and working to solve the same challenges.
- Make decisions together. As fairly radical changes are being made to structure, work environment, communication patterns, and work itself, leaders in the roundtable encouraged other leaders to make as many decisions as possible together as teams. Things such as asking for agenda items, asking for input on meeting cadence, duration, ideas for getting the work done, and the like, can go a long way to build trust and buy in.
- Understand nuances in team engagement. With the large number of people working remotely, it’s worth paying attention to how teams are maintaining their engagement at this time. As such, it’s important that leaders maintain an open mind to varying levels of engagement that may point to different needs across teams. So in addition to providing resources to individual people, organizations should consider providing resources to teams like promoting frequent check-ins, managing collective anxiety, and showing empathy toward one another.
- Scale up tools. To keep a close pulse on engagement, leaders in our roundtable mentioned that organizations need to amplify and scale up tools, especially for middle-managers so they can understand team engagement real-time. We heard that this is a particular area of opportunity, especially for the healthcare industry because it tends to lag behind in engagement tools and resources at the mid-management level.
Collaboration
Organizations that distribute authority get more Collaboration (and should encourage it). More minds are better than one – and organizations are able to gather insights across different areas or business functions when authority is distributed.
Cross-functional teams are enabled to solve challenges or take advantage of opportunities at the edge of the organization rather than waiting for central decision-makers to either notice the challenge or prioritize it. Collaboration also builds employee networks, which in turn increases the flow of knowledge around the organization, allowing employees more ready access to expertise.
Advice from leaders:
- Be clear on expectations. Distributed authority does not mean that organizations operate in chaos. Organizations should be clear on expectations and desired outcomes. For teams, either formal or informal, expectations can act as a unifying force that help to foster communication and break down barriers
- Look for stumbling blocks. As organizations have focused on efficiency and productivity over the past 100 years, they’ve also standardized ways of doing things that often stand in the way of collaboration. To enable employees to exercise their authority, organizations should look for those things that may keep employees from sharing information with each other and helping each other on projects.
- Embrace self-driven teams. Allowing greater fluidity in how teams operate may help address some of the current engagement challenges people face today. For example, people in autonomous or self-driven teams can volunteer to combine different skills or talents to address a particular immediate need and maximize their impact. They can also exercise autonomy as a team by deciding priorities to work on each day and how they will divvy up tasks to accomplish them.
- Think in terms of MVP deliverables. A minimum viable product (MVP) or deliverable is a version of the deliverable that allows a team to collect the maximum amount of value with the least amount of effort. Particularly now, organizations can begin to think in terms of MVP and consistent iteration instead of holding a deliverable until it is nigh on perfect. This encourages innovation and collaboration, but also helps employees focus on what is value-add.
- Default to the strategy. In helping employees determine what’s important, consistently reiterate the end goal or strategy. Ask them to ask themselves, “how is what I’m doing related to the end goal or strategy?”
- Stand up meetings. While many teams are not currently collocated, one leader said that they still have a daily standup meeting. The meeting allows all members to check in with each other, to raise questions or concerns, and to state what they will be working on. This requires each team member to come to that meeting already having thought about the value-add activities they would be accomplishing during the day. It was also a nice opportunity to connect on a human level.
- Focus internally. A few leaders mentioned that they are using this time to actively work on their internal structures and norms. Employees and managers are finding internal projects that have been on the back burner for years, but once complete, will increase the abilities of the organization. Thus, not all value-add activities should be externally focused; sometimes the best thing employees can focus on are internal.
To sum up
Overall, our roundtable conversations acknowledged the important role that distributing decision-making has on enabling the organization to effectively and efficiently respond to external needs. There was also a sense of urgency around the need for greater clarity, communication, and expectations around decisions, especially within the current remote working context.
A special thanks for all the leaders who joined our second roundtable. Thank you for your willingness to share ideas and insights – it makes our research that much better!
The Purpose-Driven Org: What the Literature Says
Posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2020 at 2:17 PM
Introduction
We’ve been living in a COVID-19 world for quite some time now, and many people are feeling the effects. Companies cut more than 700,000 jobs in March and the total of unemployed workers now exceeds 16 million.1,2 Suppliers are scaling back on production,3 and the consumer confidence index declined in March to 120.0 as compared with 132.6 in February.4 In many ways, there's a sense that we just need to survive this time before we can get “back to normal.”
But in so many other ways, this crisis is providing an opportunity for individuals and organizations to contribute more to others than they ever have before. Many leaders right now assume that companies have an obligation to their workers and communities – even to humankind – to figure out what they can uniquely contribute to help others get through this crisis. And what’s more – to get it to them for free or at cost. (Click here for an epic list of companies contributing to humankind.)
This crisis has brought purpose-driven organizations – those organizations with a responsibility to deliver value to its stakeholders, not just shareholders – into the spotlight.
Given this dynamic, it's even more important to understand how organizations inspire people and make purpose-driven decisions. Our hope is that we can capitalize on this unique moment to better understand how leaders and HR professionals can leverage purpose to navigate the current crisis and continue to add value well beyond it.
To that end, we have begun a study on this topic for which we're asking:
What is the role of purpose-driven organizations today, and how can they help stakeholders navigate and survive this new reality?
It’s important to start by understanding what others have said – and there’s a lot of that! To better understand purpose in organizations, we looked at more than 50 published scholarly articles, periodicals, research reports, and blogs from the past 5 years. Given the current COVID-19 pandemic, we also extensively scoured what's been written more recently to identify trends or shifts in purpose-driven organizations.
5 themes from our lit review
Five themes emerged from our review. In this article, we summarize the most interesting insights we learned:
- Good purpose statements inspire action
- Relationships anchored in purpose can increase resilience
- Purpose enriches the employee experience
- Leaders face barriers to purpose-driven decisions
- Purpose-driven metrics are a big problem
Good purpose statements inspire action
Many organizations spend a significant amount of time, effort, and even money developing a purpose statement. Some even outsource it to PR or advertising firms to come up with a catchy slogan. But our review found a different story for organizations that are able to develop a good purpose statement and activate it throughout the organization.
Good purpose statements are clearly defined and distinct from other different, though related, terms like mission, vision, values, and principles:5,6
- Mission. Establishes the organization’s specific business – what it is and what it isn’t
- Vision. Defines what the organization aspires to become in the future
- Values. Defines what the organization prioritizes and values most
- Principles. Outlines a set of behavioral guidelines or rules
Purpose, on the other hand, has its unique flavor:7
Purpose: Expresses the organization’s impact on multiple stakeholders (employees, customers, shareholders, suppliers, communities) and connects to people’s intrinsic motivation. At times, it’s even called an organization’s philosophical beat because it serves to inspire employees.
Good purpose statements motivate people to take action through a shared sense of direction. It's shared because there's a collective sense among colleagues of working toward an unquestionable common goal.8
Relationships anchored in purpose can increase resilience
For purpose-driven leaders, challenging situations represent an opportunity for the organization to live up to its purpose of serving a greater cause. This couldn’t be more true in today’s coronavirus situation. Many organizations are shifting priorities to address market needs, such as distilleries and perfume makers that are now manufacturing hand sanitizers9 or automakers now producing ventilators.10 These actions can go a long way. Research shows that 88% of people feel it’s particularly crucial that organizations not only have a clear purpose statement, but they also demonstrate behaviors which are congruent with it.11
In our readings, we found that the benefits of purpose go both ways because people are more willing to help and defend a purpose-driven organization, if necessary. In a recent U.S. study, for example12
- 73% of people said they would be more likely to defend a purpose-driven company if someone spoke badly of it
- 67% of people said they would be more forgiving of companies that lead with purpose compare to those that do not
In companies that had an average annual growth rate of 30% or more in the previous 5 years, purpose enabled them to overcome the challenges of slowing growth and declining profitability.13 In general, purpose isn’t only beneficial to stakeholders, but it's also favorable to purpose-driven organizations. It allows them to build trust and loyalty both internally and externally, which in the end, can make them more resilient to challenging situations.
Purpose enriches the employee experience
During the current COVID-19 pandemic, it may be easy for employee experience – employees’ collective perceptions of their ongoing interactions with the organization14 – to take a back seat as organizations grapple with business disruptions. But, while it may be tempting to neglect employee experience, truly purpose-driven organizations tend to be better equipped to protect it.
For example, in purpose-driven organizations, HR plays a crucial role in helping people understand their purpose, how it connects to the organization’s purpose, and how their daily work contributes to it. This extra attention and effort in helping individuals connect their individual work to the organization’s purpose, especially during a crisis, go a long way in enhancing people’s connection to their work and the organization. Employees who perceive their work as meaningful and purposeful are 3 times more likely to stay with their organization.15
Organizational culture is a particularly important element in purpose-driven organizations. For example, we noticed a parallel between our study on employee experience and the purpose-driven organizations in our readings. Organizations with a positive employee experience display 5 behaviors that are woven into their cultural fabric (see Figure 1).16
Similarly, purpose-driven organizations, and especially leaders, tend to demonstrate behaviors that support a positive employee experience:
- Collaboration. In purpose-driven cultures, shared purpose – a collective sense of working with colleagues toward a common goal – is the most important source of meaning for employees.
- And meaning matters because employees who rate their work as very meaningful report 14% more job satisfaction than average employees, and 51% more satisfaction than employees with the least meaningful jobs.17
- The power of shared purpose is more important now than ever. Consider healthcare workers on the frontlines who continue to put themselves at risk to treat infected patients driven by their shared purpose of saving lives.
- Examples of HR activities that foster collaboration and shared purpose:
- Career pathing to help existing employees discover their individual purpose and align it to career paths, projects, and new experiences that fuel their sense of meaning and purpose.
- Learning and development opportunities – training, mentoring, coaching, education, resources – to help employees build skills that further their sense of meaning along with the organization’s purpose.
- Alignment. Purpose-driven leaders use storytelling to help employees personally identify with the impact of their daily work on the organization’s stakeholders,18 which creates alignment and a stronger sense of shared purpose.
- The current pandemic is inspiring a sense of shared purpose and alignment among many leaders. Messages like Together We Will Persevere from SAP’s co-CEOs and Coming Together to Combat COVID-19 from Microsoft’s CEO are more common now than in recent years.
- Example of HR practices that create alignment:
- Recruitment (hiring for purpose) by having a compelling employer brand that attracts the right individual to apply for jobs at the organization.
- Transparency. Purpose-driven organizations have leaders who translate (reduce the complexity of purpose) and truthfully communicate the social impact of every decision.19
- Consider for example, Patagonia’s decision to close all stores amid the COVID-19 outbreak to protect both employees and customers, and their commitment to continuing to pay employees throughout their closure.
- Example of HR practices that cultivate transparency:
- Communication to clearly and constantly convey purpose-driven beliefs, values, assumptions, behaviors, and decisions.
- Psychological safety. Purpose-driven leaders dedicate time to talk personally with employees and intentionally integrate rituals or events that manifest their shared sense of purpose and enhance their mutual trust and psychological safety.
- Crises like the current pandemic are testing many leaders’ ability to calm down fears and instill a sense of safety throughout the organization. The Coronavirus Generosity Challenge is an example of leaders who are finding ways to make a positive contribution internally and externally amid the current situation.
- Example of HR practices that build greater psychological safety:
- Manager support to learn to lead a remote team with empathy (e.g., encourage them to check-in more frequently with their direct reports via video conferencing or phone calls and have meaningful conversations).
- Feedback-sharing. Purpose-driven organizations actively solicit employees’ ideas to activate their individual sense of meaning and their collective sense of purpose.20
- Purpose-driven organizations tend to measure purpose through real-time feedback mechanisms (e.g., pulse surveys) that influence the employee experience.
- Example of HR practices that support feedback-sharing:
- Pulse surveys to collect real-time and frequent employee feedback, especially during these challenging times.
Leaders face barriers to purpose
Historically, many leaders have believed that a purpose-driven focus conflicts with a profit-driven approach. This may be of no surprise as most of the world has focused on only maximizing profit for shareholders. But even though purpose is often cast as the opposite of business profit, this isn’t necessarily the case.
Organizations can define their impact on stakeholders as a spectrum of possibilities based on what aligns with the firm’s objectives and values. This spectrum can range from deliberate social impact to maximizing both impact and profit objectives, and to meeting the traditional market expectations of pure business profit (see Figure 2).21
Beyond the purpose-vs-profit debate, leaders face other barriers that prevent them from adopting purpose-driven strategies:22,23
- Market volatility tied to shareholder expectations, which hinders leaders’ ability to focus on long-term value creation
- C-level executives sometimes lack the ability to envision synergies between sustainable development goals and their business
- Organizational systems and infrastructure that are not aligned with long-term purpose and value
- Hiring people whose individual purpose does not align with the organization’s purpose
- The lack of development opportunities for leaders who do not behave in purpose-driven ways
- Employee performance targets and incentives that are not aligned with the organization’s purpose
This is further worsened by limited purpose-driven targets or incentives tied to leaders’ scorecards; 68% of leaders see the need to make better progress in this area.24
Yet, it seems like the current COVID-19 pandemic is affording leaders a bit of flexibility to make more purpose-driven decisions than in years’ past. We’re seeing this play out in leaders’ responses to policies and practices that protect employees or in their rapid pooling of resources to address community needs for more ventilators or masks. We see 2020 as providing an opportunity to cement a purpose-driven approach as a strategic and imperative way of doing business.
Purpose-driven metrics are a big problem
Nowadays, purpose is touted as a cost-of-entry for any business. This has been partly driven by pressure from well-known investors,25 by increased scrutiny over the impact of organizations on stakeholders,26 and, to a certain extent, by the promise of greater consumer trust and loyalty along with increased talent retention.27
This focus on purpose-driven organizations is bringing the need to measure impact to the forefront – which is easier said than done. In theory, purpose-driven organizations can substantiate their triple bottom line (TBL) impact on 3 areas: people, planet, and profit.28 There are numerous measurement approaches that follow TBL principles. Here are some of the common ones:
- Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria29
- Includes measures of environmental impact (e.g., green building, pollution prevention, energy efficiency), social metrics (e.g., human capital engagement, labor standards), and governance (e.g., business ethics).
- Social return on investment (SROI)30
- Tracks relevant social, environmental, and economic outcomes to forecast or evaluate impact. It calculates a ratio after assigning a monetary value to inputs and outcomes.
- B Corporation Certification31
- Assesses all aspects of a company (environmental and social impact, corporate governance, community involvement) based on accountability and transparency standards.
- SAM Corporate Sustainability Assessment32
- Serves a wide range of stakeholders and includes several indices:
- The Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSI)
- S&P ESG Index
- ISO 26000 Social Responsibility33
- Provides guidelines to effectively assess and address social responsibilities to multiple stakeholders: customers, employees, environment, suppliers, and shareholders.
But in reality, organizations find it challenging to actually measure their TBL; only 35% of companies align their business practices to a multistakeholder model today.34 This is partly driven by unclear and unsystematic reporting mechanisms.
Entities such as The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) aim to fill this gap by outlining specific reporting guidelines that facilitate organization- and industrywide comparisons.35 Organizations can use the recommended guidelines to report their impact across clearly defined economic, environmental, and social categories.
Must-read articles
These articles caught our attention because they're interesting or insightful in helping us understand purpose-driven organizations.
Gartner HR survey reveals 88% of organizations have encouraged or required employees to work from home due to coronavirus
“As the COVID-19 crisis disrupts organizations across the globe, HR leaders must respond quickly and comprehensively, considering both immediate and long-term talent consequences.”
This article summarizes findings from a recent HR survey on how organizations are addressing coronavirus challenges and needs.
Highlights:
- States that 88% of organizations have encouraged or required employees to work from home.
- Shows how organizations are responding to coronavirus-related absences.
- Lists recommendations for HR leaders on managing remote talent.
COVID-19 and corporate purpose—Four ways businesses can respond now
“When faced with this unremitting uncertainty, how can a company maintain clarity on its societal purpose? What is the role and responsibility of your business in a time of chaos and crisis?”
This article suggests four levers to guide purpose-driven organizations during the current COVID-19 crisis.
Highlights:
- Recommends that organizations leverage their core business assets to meet the current needs of stakeholders.
- Emphasizes the importance of focusing on generosity and compassion (vs. profit) during this time of need by adding value to stakeholders, especially employees and local communities.
- Advises leaders to keep a long-term view of their company’s role in navigating the pandemic and helping stakeholders return to normalcy once the current crisis passes.
We are nowhere near stakeholder capitalism
Vijay Govindarajan & Anup Srivastava
“While we admit that considerable progress has been made in developing theory, models, and disclosure norms for ESG objectives, we believe that we are nowhere close to achieving ‘integrated reporting,’ as some people might claim.”
This article states that many organizations aren’t creating value for all stakeholders.
Highlights:
- Suggests that real change will come once organizations transform their financial and non-financial measures.
- Mentions that maximizing shareholder returns remains the main objective – while keeping ESG goals as a secondary objective – for many organizations.
- Asserts that organizations aren’t close to developing an “integrated reporting” framework that includes both tangible and intangible capital resources.
Put purpose at the core of your strategy
Thomas W. Malnight, Ivy Buche, Charles Dhanaraj
“When customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders see that a company has a strong higher purpose, they are more likely to trust it and more motivated to interact with it.”
This article highlights results from a global study of companies that use purpose to generate sustainable growth, stay relevant, and deepen ties with stakeholders.
Highlights:
- Describes a purpose-driven strategy to help companies overcome challenges.
- Provides specific suggestions to help organizations define their purpose and implement it as a core business strategy.
- Highlights the tangible and intangible benefits of purpose to organizations.
Putting purpose to work: A study of purpose in the workplace
Shannon Schuyler & Abigail Brennan
“Purpose is about empathy – it defines the human needs and desires that a company’s products and services fulfill.”
This report discusses results from a study of over 1,500 U.S. employees across 39 industries on purpose in the workplace.
Highlights:
- Considers leaders’ role in purpose-driven organizations, especially in their communication and decision-making.
- Identifies team leaders and coaches as holding the greatest potential to help employees identify and translate their individual meaning and purpose into the organization’s purpose.
- Discusses the role of younger generations in shaping the purpose conversation.
9 out of 10 people are willing to earn less money to do more-meaningful work
Shawn Achor, Andrew Reece, Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, Alexi Robichaux
“The old labor contract between employer and employee – the simple exchange of money for labor – has expired.”
This article discusses results from the Meaning and Purpose at Work Report, and asserts that people highly value meaningful work.
Highlights:
- Identifies that more than 9 out of 10 employees are willing to trade a percentage of the earnings for greater meaning at work.
- States that many companies fail to leverage the power of meaning at work despite its many benefits to both employees and organizations.
- Recommends a series of actions companies and leaders can take to support and foster a sense of meaning and purpose throughout the organization.
Additional articles for your reading pleasure
- “A Time to Lead with Purpose and Humanity,” Joly, H., Harvard Business Review, 2020.
- “From Being Purpose-Led to Foster A Toxic Culture: Why Companies Like Away Fail to Live Up to Their Promises,” Bulgarella, C., Forbes, 2019.
- “Balancing Profit and Social Welfare: Ten Ways to Do It,” Craig Smith, N. & Lankoski, L., INSEAD, 2018.
- “Creating a Purpose-Driven Organization,” Quinn, R.E. & Thakor, A.V., Harvard Business Review, 2018.
- “The Purposeful Company,” Chapman, C., Edmans, A., Gosling, T., Hutton, W., & Mayer, C., Big Innovation Centre, 2017.
- “Purpose-Led Organization: ’Saint Antony’ Reflects on the Idea of Organizational Purpose, in Principle and Practice,” White, A., Yakis-Douglas, B., Helanummi-Cole, H., & Ventresca, M., Journal of Management Inquiry, 2016.
- “The Business Case for Purpose,” Keller, V., EY Beacon Institute & Harvard Business Review, 2015.
Employee Experience in Pandemic
Posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2020 at 9:51 PM
These are slides from a presentation that Stacia Garr, Co-founder of RedThread Research, gave with Melissa Arronte, Solution Principal at Medallia, to discuss critical areas of employee experience during COVID-19.