Diversity and Inclusion: A Simple Break Down

As someone who worked with different Kenyan tribes when running hotels and safaris, diversity and inclusion is a topic that is important to me.

And it should be important to you too. Why? Because employee diversity has measurable, positive effects on organizational success. Plus, on a macro level, due to the global political environment, employees are personally concerned with diversity and inclusion (D&I) issues (including gender pay equity) and want their employers to offer perspective on those issues. In this way, D&I now touches employee engagement, human rights and social justice.

Today I want to break down D&I simply, for those who see diversity and inclusion as an insurmountable challenge to tackle. We’ll start with outlining how D&I benefits company performance, including information which can be used to urge leaders to take D&I initiatives more seriously. Then, I’ll discuss how to foster inclusion at work—because what’s the point of a diverse workforce if employees don’t feel included in company culture, decision-making and upward mobility? Lastly, I’ll review some challenges that diversity brings to company culture and performance.

Four Ways Diversity Benefits Company Performance

Here are four examples of the measurable, positive effects that employee diversity has on organizational success:

1. Women increase equity, sales and ROI

Catalyst took a look at Fortune 500 companies with women on their board of directors and found that these which co? those that focus on D&I? companies had a higher return on equity by at least 53%, were superior in sales by at least 42%, and had a higher ROI, to the tune of 66%. Those are not small numbers.

2. Diverse top teams = top financial performers

McKinsey quarterly reported that between 2008 and 2010, companies with more diverse top teams were also top financial performers.

3. Diversity and inclusion identified as key driver of innovation

When 321 executives at large global enterprises ($500 million plus in annual revenues) were surveyed for the Fostering Innovation Through a Diverse Workforce study, diversity and inclusion were identified as the key driver of not only internal innovation, but also business growth.

4. Diverse groups are superior problem solvers

Groups of diverse problem solvers outperformed groups of high-ability problem solvers, according to a study by Lu Hong and Scott E. Page.

Creating a diverse staff and culture is only the first step. It doesn’t do much good without inclusion, which takes effort. Because what’s the point of a room full of diverse thinkers when no one feels empowered to share their thoughts? Here are three tips to foster a sense of inclusion amongst a diverse workforce:

How Managers Foster A Sense Of Inclusion Among A Diverse Workforce

1. Coach People To Listen More and Interrupt Less

Listening is a key element of inclusion, and while it sounds simple, it actually requires practice and intention. Leaders and managers need to coach people to listen more and interrupt less. They need to listen with their whole selves—taking into account the words, body language and energy of the communicator.

2. Encourage Equal Stage Time in All Meetings

We’ve all been in meetings that were dominated by the person with the loudest voice. And unfortunately, the “squeaky wheel” strategy does sometimes garner results in the business world. This is the opposite of inclusion. Encourage meetings where all speak up equally. This will take some careful management at first, but with time the culture of the meetings will change, and more voices will be heard.

3. Work On Your Own Bias

Our own bias can greatly influence decision-making, often preventing inclusion unconsciously. Here are six quick tips for working on our own biases.

• Start by taking the IAT test to identify biases you have that yet may be unaware of: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
• Watch your language. Biased language is ingrained in how we speak, but can exclude diverse employees. For example, “Okay you guys, let’s get down to work,” does not include female members of the team.
• Identify particular elements in company processes that function as entry points for bias. For example, is your hiring committee all male? People tend to be drawn to others like themselves. If you identify your hiring committee as largely dominated by one gender or ethnicity, change it up.
• Include positive images of diverse groups in the workplace such as posters, newsletters, videos, reports and podcasts. This helps our brains make positive associations with groups we may otherwise be unconsciously biased toward.
• Visualize a positive interaction with toward with those you have a bias against. Visualization is powerful and can actually alter the brain.
• Encourage workers to call out bias and hold each other accountable. Yes, that means calling out leaders too.
  
  

The Challenges Diversity Brings To Company Performance Or Company Culture

Diversity increases different ways of seeing the world and how people work. For example, how a person from the U.S. views time versus how a person from China views time may be drastically different. Learning the cultural differences between team members strengthens team understanding.

In addition, the complexity of ideas increases with more diverse teams. This is more difficult to manage than homogenous ideas, which require less debate to come to agreement and make decisions. While diversity breeds innovation, it can also present a challenge and requires careful communication skills.

Welcoming diversity and inclusion into your organization is critical. I urge all leaders to take an honest look at where diversity and inclusion stands in their organization, and make it a strategic priority.

Share your questions about diversity and inclusion in the comment section below, via email, or on Twitter. Myself or members of my community will do our best to answer!

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What The Heck Is Executive Coaching

“What the heck is executive coaching?” I get asked that question many times a day.

I admit that coaching is a nebulous term. When I say that I’m a certified coach, people ask if I coach sports teams. When I say that I actually coach work teams, people look surprised. ‘Why would a work team need coaching?’ they ask. Because work teams are just like sports teams:

• They are made up of different people who try to reach a team goal together.
• Each person on the team has two types of goals in mind: individual goals and team goals.
• Every team member has his/her own communication style, which may or may not work well with the others on the team.
• Although there is one official leader (the coach or captain), there are usually other team members who carry as much weight, if not more weight, than the official leader.

Similar to a sports team, thriving work teams need an ‘outsider’ to coach them to success, whether the whole team or just some of the team leaders. That’s what CHCI does. We coach teams and leaders to get from Point A to Point B, in the most effective way possible.

During the years, many people have asked for a practical book on coaching, so they can bring coaching skills to their own teams. That’s how Anne Loehr’s book, “A Manager’s Guide to Coaching” was created. Here is an excellent write up about one of the book topics: How to create effective coaching questions. Enjoy!

Let’s share experiences. Leave a comment below, send me an email, or find me on Twitter.

How to Train Your Staff With A Decreasing Budget

In our last blog, How to Use the 70/20/10 Model to Develop Careers, we discussed the “what”, “when” and “how” of using the 70/20/10 Adult Learning Model for employee development. Now let’s discuss the “why”.

Managers face daily decisions to ensure their team gets what’s needed for success. But with budgets getting smaller, it’s hard to stretch resources. After reading this blog, you will learn several tips on how to stretch your training budget, spend wisely, plan strategically and still meet your employee development goals.

The “Why” to Employee Development

What is the return on investment (ROI) for a manager who wants to allocate time and financial resources for her employees? Simply put: a better prepared employee is a more productive employee. According to the Association of Talent Development (ATD), companies that invest in training employees see a 218% higher income per employee than companies that don’t. The 70/20/10 model for employee development is one effective tool to leverage the current talents of your staff and build stronger teams, which increases the organizational bottom line.

We know that the manager cannot motivate an employee to improve; that has come from within the employee. However, managers can create a learning environment for them to grow. How? The first step is to take an inventory of the current staff, using a consistent assessment tool such as a 360-degree assessment, with an objective lens to collect skills data. This full assessment will provide two sets of data in one assessment: strengths and areas to grow. By selecting the right 360 tool, you can complete two tasks at once for the same price, creating cost savings for your budget. This 360 view lets managers begin to leverage the strengths in their staff that can be shared with other employees; it also shows the delta between the strengths and weaknesses, so you can create the best strategy to decrease the weaknesses of the entire team.

Why Are Employees Leaving Your Organization?

In our daily lives, we use personal biases, intuitions, and gut feelings to make our decisions. And that’s perfectly fine. They serve us well in many ways.

However, when it comes to improving work performances, personal biases, intuitions, and gut feelings just don’t cut it.

Data can improve your own, your team’s, and your organization’s performance; people analytics can help. People analytics is the data that identifies workforce patterns and trends. Here are some questions that can be answered with people analytics:

• How engaged are our employees?
• What skills does my organization need to invest in, to achieve our mission?
• Why are my employees leaving the organization?

These questions and many more are the kinds of questions that people analytics can answer. Even if you don’t regularly use data in your job, you can still learn a lot with people analytics, regardless of your supervisory level.

A brief primer on people analytics

Before we answer why employees are leaving your organization, let’s start by defining a few terms:

Data are facts, statistics, or other items of information. Data are all around us; you just have to know how to look for it, compile it, and make sense of it. We can use data to understand problems and processes at a micro-level (between individuals), at a mezzo-level (team-level), or at a macro level (organizational level).

So who uses data?

One group of people who use data are data analysts. Data analysts organize, examine, analyze and use data to draw meaning. They tend to focus on understanding previous events to describe things that have already happened.

How to Break the Glass Ceiling

Panelists at the IREM Global Summit share best practices for mitigating bias and advancing diversity.

Cultivating talent is the industry-wide mission for the property management profession and all of the commercial real estate. At the Institute of Real Estate Management’s Global Summit last week in San Francisco, an international panel of rising leaders shared best practices and strategies for advancing that goal through diversity.

Signs of progress for women in real estate stand side by side with persistent contradictions. Women entrepreneurs enjoy a rising profile; nearly one-third of all privately held firms are owned by women. On the educational front, women bring more to the table; they hold more undergraduate degrees than men and earn 50 percent more graduate degrees than their male counterparts. Women’s workplace priorities are led by flexibility and quality of life, according to national studies; compensation ranks third.

The speakers also recounted the qualities that women in business tend to bring to the table. “The more diversity, the better your product is going to be, the better your bottom line is going to be,” noted Anne Loehr, executive vice president at the Center for Human Capital Innovation and the panel’s moderator.

Optimize Your Recruitment Process by Using Competencies

Recently, we wrote about the five steps to optimize employee development with a competency framework. This 5-step process begins with identifying organizational competencies and determining expected proficiencies by employee position and continues. The next two steps include assessing competencies and aligning the current proficiency with organizational needs and career aspirations. Finally, each employee should track progress to enhance accountability and results. This process helps develop employees and optimize organizational performance.

A meaningful competency framework can also improve recruiting practices. By aligning organizational competencies and expected proficiency levels with position descriptions, it allows you to hire people who are a good fit for the organization in a strategic and targeted way. Here are three ways to do this:

1.     Assess and categorize competencies by type.

2.  Map the minimum expected proficiency by competency within each group to position descriptions.

3.  Identify and align behavioral questions with priority competencies during the interview process.

Assessing and Categorizing Competencies

Many organizations have “core” or “foundational” competencies that are distinct from technical competencies. Core competencies are the skills, knowledge, and abilities that all employees should have and work to improve, no matter their technical expertise. Examples include effective communication, problem-solving, and customer service. Technical competencies capture areas of expertise needed to be successful in a particular job series or position. Examples include competencies related to accounting, mechanical engineering, or computer science.

Identifying the expected proficiency for core competencies can often be streamlined by creating categories instead of defining them position by position. For example, CHCI recently updated its competency framework and categorized its foundational competencies into four groups: 

1) Corporate Member
2) Senior Consultant
3) Consultant and
4) Organizational and Project Support. These categories were defined by responsibilities and experience across all current and projected CHCI employees. 

Mapping Expected Proficiency to Position Descriptions

Once the categories are defined, the expected proficiency by core competency can be set. This expected competency clarifies the behaviors and skillets expected of employees in a particular category, at the time of hire or in their current position. Returning to our example, a small group at CHCI went through each foundational competency and identified the expected proficiency by competency in the four categories mentioned above by using a standard proficiency scale ranging from 1: Awareness to 5: Expert. The process included a select group of individuals who aimed for consensus agreement. The following criteria and/or process steps were identified to ensure consistency:

• No category of the employee should have an expected proficiency of “5” or “expert.” This doesn’t mean that an individual cannot have a current proficiency of “expert” but that it should not be expected in order to be successful in the organization. This criterion also encourages the idea of development and growth for all individuals, regardless of title.

• Key assumptions were identified that distinguishes the categories. For example, responsibilities in the Executive Member category focused on organizational outcomes and integrating processes across the organization while the Senior Consultant category focused on integration across the project as well as project delivery and leadership. Other assumptions included general levels of responsibility and proficiency required to be successful across all categories.

To define expected proficiency for technical competencies, a slightly different process was followed in the CHCI example:

1.   Position descriptions (PDs) were written for new hires based on priority needs and organizational capabilities.

2. Each group member independently identified expected proficiency across technical competencies using the PDs and the standard proficiency scale as their guide. It is worthy to note that not all technical competencies were required for each PD.

3.   The results from each individual’s process were consolidated into a matrix. The group met to review and analyze results.

4.   Expected proficiency scores were agreed upon and finalized for both technical and “foundational” competencies for each position description. A rationale for each expected proficiency was documented across all competencies for each PD to double-check the logic.

Aligning Competencies with the Interview Process

The example mapping exercise allowed PDs to become competency-based, aligning potential employees with both organization culture and performance. The alignment then streamlined the interview preparation process for hiring managers, allowing them to prioritize questions based on targeted competencies and expected proficiencies in a particular position.

For CHCI, that meant preparing interview questions for Senior Human Capital candidates in four priority areas. Behavioral questions were developed to understand the depth and breadth of each candidate’s experience.

Creating a recruitment process that incorporates the organization’s competency model will lead to high-performing hires that make a good cultural fit for the organization, the project, and the position. When individuals fit into the culture of the organization, they are likely to be more motivated, interact more easily with other employees, and stay happier in the job. All of this translates into higher-performing employees who will stay longer and potentially become highly qualified candidates for succession plans.

Once you hire a candidate, you can reinforce the organization’s values, culture, and competencies through your onboarding programs, annual competency assessments, and constructive feedback. This helps bring the entire talent life cycle together Click here.

Do you want to learn more about aligning competencies with your hiring process? Learn more by contacting us.