Where The Rubber Meets The Road in Pt. 4 Of Problem, Opportunities And Solutions For Gender Equality In Corporate Culture
Tools, tactics, and team dynamics for the rubber to meet the road are discussed this week as the panel discussion, The Inclusion Roadmap: Where to Start Engaging Men in the Workplace.-Pt. 4 of Problem, Opportunities And Solutions For Gender Equality In Corporate Culture continues with Dr. Ronald Copeland from Kaiser Permanente, MD Senior Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer of National Diversity Inclusions, Strategy and Policy, Lesley Slaton Brown from HP Inc., Chief Diversity Officer, Nadia Chargualaf, Telstra Vice President of Human Resources for U.S. Operations. Mike Dillon from PwC, Chief Diversity Officer and hosted by Co Founder of Inclusionary Leadership Group, Dale Thomas Vaughn. The business case, a top down approach, the utilization of metrics and more are discussed in the transcript below or in the video to the right. The first three parts of the series can be found here:
Part 1 Of Problem, Opportunities And Solutions For Gender Equality In Corp. Culture
Part 2 Of Problem, Opportunities And Solutions For Gender Equality In Corp. Culture
Part 3 Of Problem, Opportunities And Solutions For Gender Equality In Corp. Culture
Part 4 Of Problem, Opportunities And Solutions For Gender Equality In Corporate Culture
Dale Thomas Vaughn:
Let’s move from the strategy down into the tactics, to where the rubber meets the road. What are the tools, the tactics, the teams, the stuff that actually is moving forward for your company? Anything that you’ve seen specifically work for you or anything that you’re certainly excited about putting into place in the future?
GO OUT AND HAVE COLOR BRAVE CONVERSATIONS
Mike Dillon:
Thank you. I would say a few things, I would first start with just the authentic conversations in the workplace. Last summer we started our color brave conversations around race in the workplace, after some of the tragedies that were happening across the U.S. I think we were one of the first firms and companies in the U.S. to do this in such a large scale way.
We really did it from the bottom up and said, “Go out, have these conversations, they’re very important to talk about, people’s experience outside the workplace.” We know that people bring a lot of this into the workplace every day, so that was very important.
Better Man Conference 2017
At the same time, we really rolled out our colorblind training to everyone, and that is our unconscious bias training. What we did this year that was I think different, you talked earlier about, “Do you make it mandatory or not?” You shouldn't make it mandatory, but we did however say, “It’s a really important part of your leadership skills in this firm, so if you’re going to be promoted in this firm, you need to take the unconscious bias training because we think it’s so important.”
Now out of our 52,000 people, over 30,000 people have taken that training and we think that has been a really important tool for people to be aware of their blind spot but also to mitigate them.
Dale Thomas Vaughn:
Beautiful.
Nadia Chargulaf:
I think you are absolutely right, I don't think we can talk about tools even or programs unless we first identify that unconscious bias and make the company as a whole, especially leaders, aware. We did a training with the Gender Leadership Group (now Inclusionary Leadership Group) in my office with just our senior leaders, and 95% of the attendees were men, all of whom said, “There is no issue with gender in our workplace. I work with women every day, everybody respects everybody, there’s no sexism here.”
THERE IS A GENDER ISSUE AND A BUSINESS CASE IS NEEDED TO SOLVE IT
Once we went through the numbers, and said, “Hey, listen, we're at 26%, what do you want to do about that?” It was instant solution mode. But my point is, it was giving them the tools and the language to talk about gender, their own gender, as well as the genders around them, that safe place to have that discussion, and really identify that “Yes! There is an issue. And yes, it needs a business case to solve it!” And then move into the solution mode.
When I, the HR manager, rolled out a program that says to all hiring managers, “We're going to have 50/50 candidate posts, you can't talk to any candidate unless half of them are women and half of them are men.” If I had rolled it out before the training, which I did actually, I didn't get a lot of buy in. But after that workshop, I got a lot of buy in. People understood why it was important for the culture, and for the business, and for the bottom-line.
Lesley Slaton Brown:
I think for us, our number one goal was to embed diversity and inclusion into everything that we do. So as we started from the top with our Board of Directors and pushed down into our senior leaders, our business leaders, we then looked at, well if you’re going to embed, you have to then allow first and foremost, debunk the myth that diversity and inclusion really lies as the responsibility of HR and D&I and make it everyone’s responsibility. We had senior leaders that stepped forward, Kim Rivera, who is our General Counsel at HP, who said, “You know what? The impact that I want to make, because we have the culture that we do at HP, gives her the runway to be able to say, “Not only do I want to impact the work that we're doing internally, I want to be able to influence the industry.”
And so what she did as the General Counsel, she was one of three that made a public statement that said, “We will do a 10% hold back with our law firms. We want to see our law firms at the highest level, at the partnership level, we want to see them have a representation of women and under-represented groups and minorities.” Kim pushed for that and that’s been about a year ago. We've been brainstorming and she’s going to do some more stuff to keep pushing that agenda.
THE TIME FOR TALK IS OVER, THE TIME FOR ACTION IS NOW
Our Chief Marketing Officer, Antonio Lucio, did something similar with the advertising and communications agencies that he works with. He said, “If I'm accountable, give me the time, first and foremost to...” and our motto is kind of, “The time for talk is over, the time for action is now.” Antonio took that to heart and said, “I want to first ensure that my organization is representative of what I'm demanding of the agencies that I work with.” So he got his organization at about 50% women, he’s still working on U.S. minorities.
He pushed out to his groups and his agencies a mandate that said, “You will be responsible. HP’s mission is to create products for everyone everywhere, and we need to have our agencies represent everyone, everywhere.” So he put out that mission for his agencies, and they are working fast and furious right now in order to get that representation at the creative level, at the production level. And we're going to keep pushing.
Dale Thomas Vaughn:
Nice!
Dr. Ronald Copeland:
I talked about our strategic framework and our framework has five pillars to it, they all align with our mission and how from a priority standpoint, we want diversity, inclusion and equity to show up in our organization. First of all, before we get to those pillars though, there’s a guiding belief and principle within Kaiser Permanente that our workforce, from the board level to the front lines, our aspiration is to have it reflect the diversity of the communities that we serve. And we serve very diverse communities across this country. Our patient and member base speaks over a 126 different languages.
DIVERSITY, INCLUSION and EQUITY IS A SHARED RESPONSIBILITY and ACCOUNTABILITY FOR EVERYONE IN THE ORGANIZATION SUPPORTING OUR MISSION
Better Man Conference 2017
We know we have to be culturally relevant and responsive, and we use our workforce as allies and internal advisers and external ambassadors in that effort. That’s a value proposition and a set of expectations. From the standpoint of how we get our work done and how it’s fully integrated, we follow the same philosophy that this has to be fully embedded in our business operations, that it is a shared responsibility and accountability for everyone in the organization supporting our mission.
We focus in five areas. One is the actual delivery of health and healthcare services; the clinical care, which is a big part of the services that we deliver as an integrated care and delivery model. A workforce, to make sure we have access to diverse talent, and develop that talent into diverse leaders. The third area is in our marketing and sales, and we need to make sure as our organization grows in membership, we are attractive based on our value proposition and our delivery suite of services to all communities, diverse and otherwise. The fourth area is in our supply of diversity, our community engagement, to make sure that as a very large integrated system that has revenues in the 65 billion dollar range, that a significant amount of our vendors spend buying supplies and services are also directed towards women and minority owned business in the communities as part of the community engagement strategy to ensure that economic engines are created in our communities as a source of changing the living circumstances of people. Then the fifth area is our focus on policies, regulatory, and accreditation requirements, all of which are increasingly requiring that measurement, and demonstration by measurement, of your commitment to diversity inclusion and policies and practices is there.
WE PUT METRICS IN PLACE TO HELP LEADERS SEE RESULTS OF THEIR COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION PRACTICES
Those areas we measure and benchmark tremendously to see how we're doing against accreditation requirements, as well as, how we're doing on the national and international basis on a comparative basis and we lead in a lot of those categories. But in actually tackling things to get work done, leadership, it is clear to our leaders that this is not only an expectation, but a requirement in terms of developing diverse talent. We've put metrics in place to help leaders see at their line of sight how well or not they’re doing this. We provide tons of training, engagement, awareness, focus on leading inclusively and having diverse environments to give people not just an awareness, but actual skill in doing this.
In our workforce arenas, we have many of the engagement strategies that others do around the value of employee resource groups where talent is identified through those groups, for advocacy, and also for visibility, for availability, for sponsorship, and mentoring. In the care space, our focus has been to fully integrate our cares about diversity and inclusion into our quality and improvement activities. We don't believe you can achieve full excellence in clinical quality care at any level, illness and prevention, as well as acute and chronic care, unless you have demonstrated that you have eliminated disparities, and that all population you're serving are getting the benefit of your outcomes with full recognition that you have to tailor those solutions for the specific needs where you meet people where you stand.
Those are just categories of tactics and approaches that we use on a broad scale basis fully integrated into the business, and then we measure everything, process and outcomes, to give people insights as to where their opportunities to make sure accountability is held. And now we're building this into our performance management system as well.
CULTURE EATS STRATEGY FOR BREAKFAST
The last thing I will say is, the biggest journey, even with a formal integrated business strategy is really the culture. We've all heard the expression, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast!” So you can have all these plans and everybody lined up ready to go, but when you have the kind of issues that we're talking about here around culture and values, yes, people come to the workplace but they come from an external environment where we know their upbringing, their values that are espoused, what they believe, what they’ve experienced, and the biases that come with that, is all brought into the workplace as well. So you have to have a strategy and engagement for how you’re taking on culture, and that gives you insights if you measure culture, specifically measure inclusion. Do you have it or not? And then stratify your data by different demographic categories so that you can see that while our overall scores may look good, certain communities of members, certain patient, and workforce members are not feeling pretty happy about what’s going on, whether it’s on gender basis, ability basis, sexual orientation basis, etc. That stratification has really been helpful because it gives insights, it creates transparency, and transparency creates opportunity for improvement, as well as, accountability.
Lesley Slaton Brown:
Dale, can you tell that Dr. Copeland was a surgeon? He’s very thorough, right, I’d want him to do surgery on me.
Dr. Ronald Copeland:
Details matter.
Lesley Slaton Brown:
That’s right.
Dale Thomas Vaughn:
I want to take a little bit of a different tack here, which is, if you were to speak to a room full of leaders, and potential leaders, or the next generation of leaders, what would you tell them to go and start doing today? What is the thing you would get deeper knowledge about? What is the thing you would invest your time in? If you were starting today as a leader in this space, where would you put yourself?
TO BE CONTINUED
Better Man Conference 2017 Recap Report
We are proud to share this recap report from the Better Man Conference 2017 as just last month, 200+ leaders and many great diverse speakers and panelists, both men and women came together to be a part of the movement to engage men as inclusionary leaders at the Better Man Conference 2017. This year we grew in both quantity and quality. That’s due to your involvement. We thank each and every attendee, speaker, sponsor, marketing partner, and supporter for being such an important part of the men's inclusionary leadership movement. See the recap report here.
THANK YOU to 2017 BETTER MAN CONFERENCE SPONSORS
THANK YOU to 2017 BETTER MAN CONFERENCE MARKETING PARTNERS
