Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion: Essentials for Business Leaders

 We are thrilled to share a recent article written by Sarah Amsler of Tech Target entitled, Justice, equity, diversity and Inclusion : Essentials for businesses, that features our managing principal, Kristina Kohl, and her work in the diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging arena. TechTarget offers a network of technology-specific websites that give readers access to industry experts, independent content and analysis.

There are changing demographics within Gen Z and their expectations on JEDI issues impacts their decisions on employment.

Members of the Gen Z workforce are evaluating organizations and their leaders on their culture, actions, representations, and policies especially as they relate to environmental and social justice. They expect organizations to live their values especially around creating cultures that welcome and support individuals, their identities, and their needs. Rather than adapting to a dominant culture, Gen Z employees are looking to work for an organization that supports an equitable culture. One where all individuals can bring their true selves to work and not just survive but thrive.

Driving a J.E.D.I. transformation requires leadership to look deeply into their own culture and to understand who sets the standards for norms, values, attitudes, and beliefs.

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of Driving Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion entitled Creating a Culture of Belonging.

Creating a culture of belonging is crucial to ensuring that your workforce believes that they are welcome, supported, and valued by your organization. Driving a J.E.D.I. transformation requires leadership to look deeply into their own culture and to understand who sets the standards for norms, values, attitudes, and beliefs. Leadership must ask themselves if they expect employees and other stakeholders to assimilate into their dominant culture or if they are building an equitable culture that values and supports a variety of perspectives, identities, cultures, and styles. So often, leaders focus their strategy on increasing the diversity representation of their talent pool, but they don't fully appreciate the importance of creating a culture where diversity is appreciated, valued, and rewarded. Creating a culture of belonging means changing how organizations operate including board representation, leadership competencies, leadership development, recruiting practices, supplier practices, talent development practices, and team norms. Transforming into a J.E.D.I. organization requires drilling deep into organizational systems to understand root causes and systemic barriers built into the operating foundation.

Leveraging HR Tech to Support Hybrid Work

 As hybrid work evolves as the preferred post pandemic, work structure,  we need to consider what that means, how to support it and the role for technology is creating a hybrid workplace. Navigating this transformation is a crucial role for the human capital management (HCM0 team.

The first consideration is what do we mean by hybrid work. In some organizations is means that employees have total flexibility on scheduling remote and in person time, in others, employees can work remotely several days a week, or they must be in the office certain days and have flexibility to work remotely other days.  Depending on the organization, hybrid means different work structures that require different types of support. One hybrid work structure doesn’t meet all employee or employer needs.

As people strategy leaders, we need to consider the best options for our organizations, clients, and employees. Engaging with stakeholders is crucial to the co-creation process. Gathering input and apathetically listening to stakeholders drives engagement and adoption. Crucial to the process is leadership buy-in. If leadership is in the office 5 days a week, there isn’t a hybrid work culture. It is important that leadership model hybrid work to ensure promote acceptance and adoption. 

A single hybrid work structure doesn’t meet all employee or employer needs.

While we have already had 2 years of expecting managers to manage their divisions, functions, and teams remotely, furthering skills development for managers to offer hybrid work is crucial to keeping employees engaged and motivated. Leveraging an organizations HCM tech stack can assist in this process. Some functionality already exists within an organization’s core HCM systems through automated workflows and processes to improve onboarding engagement and promotions or transfers. Additional support can be offered through employee self-service (ESS) and manager self-service (MSS). 

The world of HCM technology is exploding and many enhanced solutions exist that are already integrated into your core HCM technology that allow for automation of transactional processes such as unemployment claims management, employment and Income verification, I-9 verification, tax credits and incentives (WOTC, R&D, and Federal and State Programs), and other services. Process automation tools such as UKG HR Service Delivery, UKG Documents Manager, and UKG People Assist help to automate standardized document distribution and retention, guide hybrid employees through processes and assigning workflow to managers based on business alignment rather than physical locations. These automation tools provide a variety of resources for employees to manage their own employee related questions around benefits, policies, and other HCM related questions without the constraints of business hours and call centers.

Leveraging AI tools can improve decision making, reduce bias, and promote equity. It is crucial to understand the technology being leveraged including the algorithms and the data being used to train the AI.

Other tools such as Phenom offer a variety of experiences for candidates (CX), existing talent (TX), recruiters (RX) , and manager (MX) through their TMX Platform AI based tools. From a candidate experience, the platform leverages AI to enhances skills alignment and matching providing candidates with the best fit options. Using an interactive chatbot, candidates are guided through the application process enhancing the experience and reducing drop rates. Employees are offered insight into open position to either apply themselves or to refer a candidate. Employees are transparently shown the open positions including the skills required so that they can access their current skills alignment or gap and seek additional training through self-service access. Recruiters have tremendous flexibility to create branded content that can be shared across the organization, and they have access to tools and dashboards to give insight. Managers gain insight into their talent pipeline, as well as their employees mobility opportunities. In addition, AI based scheduling tools can make the interview scheduling process for geographically disperse managers seamless. Leveraging AI tools can improve decision making, reduce bias, and promote equity. It is crucial to understand the technology being leveraged including the algorithms and the data being used to train the AI.

We believe the HR tech selection process is important and involves not only understanding the tools’ capabilities but also your organization’s change readiness.

There is a wide array of HR technology solutions that if selected and implemented effectively can drive impact and improve the toolkit for both managers and employees in hybrid work arrangements. If you read this blog regularly, we believe the selection is important and involves not only understanding the tools’ capabilities but also your organization’s change readiness.

Employees Seeking Purpose

 People strategy is C-suite strategy because employee engagement is crucial to your organization's bottom line. In order to feel engaged, employees are seeking to align their values and their work. They want to feel purpose at work. Purpose means different things to different people. Some people are looking for social and environmental impact. Others are looking to contribute fully and to bring their full selves to work. A recent study from McKinsey & Co found that millennials are three times more likely to require purpose at work. 

Aligning social and environmental justice into your organization's strategy is crucial to create authenticity and employee engagement . Actionable steps are provided in Kristina Kohl's book, Becoming a Sustainable Organization. Incorporating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) into your organization's strategy is a journey requiring leadership to engage with internal and external stakeholders to inform and implement this strategic vision.

Millennials are 3x more likely to require purpose at work for effective engagement.

Employees are seeking a work experience where they feel that they are contributing fully and that their contributions are valued by their team and manager. They are also looking for flexibility in scheduling and resource support to allow for life-work integration. Organizations must differentiate their work structures, benefits, and management styles to support individual employees. Moving from a dominant culture, which requires employees to conform, to an equitable culture, which supports the uniques needs of employees, supports purpose alignment. In order to support a diverse workforce, leaders and managers need to offer a more personalized approach to offering and managing work to employees. 

Empowering people drive success.

In order to support this new structure, organizations need to align people systems to support life-work integration. Organizations like our partner, UKG, are rolling out new Life-work Technology to support integrating purpose into employees' lives. These include natural language processing (NLP) survey tools to gain perspective on employee sentiment and support data driven decision-making. Innovations include accessing pay when worked rather than awaiting for a pay day, scheduling flexibility and access, identifying internal mobility options and training to support growth, and easing access to company resources and information. Empowering people drives organizational success!

Trends in Human Capital Management Technology

 

We were privileged to join our partner, Ceridian, for their Partner Summit for a conversation between Ray Wang, Founder & CEO, Constellation Research and Raja Nucho, Global Head of Partner Alliances Programs, Ceridian discussing trends and outlook for HCM technology and digital transformation. 

Ray highlighted 3 trends. Clients want a unified solution that provides analytics, automation, and AI. Integrations don’t work that well and clients are looking for business driven solution that are agile and resilient. 

Ceridian named a leader in Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant

Clients are seeking tools and resources to support return to work. They are looking for flexible solutions to support hybrid work models under the “new normal.” As global organizations bring employees back to the office, new workforce management tools and solutions are needed to support onsite, remote, and hybrid work structures.

Diversity, equity and inclusion is on everyone’s radar and the focus has shifted from nice to have to business priority. CHRO’s are looking for tools to support data driven decisions. Metrics, analytics, and data delivered on a daily basis are required to support DEI transformation.

If you are one of the many organizations with an on premise HCM solutions and it is time to upgrade, HRComputes is here to guide your organizations selection and implementation.

In the HCM SaaS environment ecosystem, partner relationships are key to bringing value to the client.  It begins with ensuring product roadmap alignment and partner collaboration to deliver on client requirements. The last mile of implementation and optimization is crucial for client success to ensure that client’s needs are addressed to ensure lifecycle value. 

We look forward to continuing working with Ceridian as a partner. They have been named as a leader in the Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant with other market leaders such as Workday, Oracle, UKG, and SAP. We are pleased to have worked with all of these market leaders delivering successful HCM digital transformations for our clients. Ray Wang’s assessment is that Ceridian’s competition is Workday based on their branding and Oracle based on their back end technology upgrades.

We are a Solution Delivery partner with UKG and an Influencer partner with Ceridian.

Driving Systemic Change

 During my Bard MBA in Sustainability Employee and Organizations class, we had the good fortune to have Alan Nevel, SVP, Chief Diversity and Human Resource Officer for MetroHealth Systems in Cleveland speaking to us on "Fighting 2 Pandemics on 1 Front-COVID-19 and systemic racism"

MetroHealth serves the health needs of communities across Northeast Ohio. Integral to fulfilling its public health mission and vision for health equity, their community engagement is focused on improving health outcomes for everyone, including underserved populations in the Cleveland and surrounding communities. 

Alan shared MetroHealth's DEI transformational journey to promote a culture of inclusion for all stakeholders-patients, staff, and community members. While MetroHealth was already on a DEI journey, the trajectory of the journey changed with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and the growing awareness of racial inequity in our society. While these inequities are not new, MetroHealth has made addressing inequities an actionable priority. Here are their goals for racial equity and inclusion.

(Source: Alan Nevel, 2/28/21 Presentation)

In order to drive these changes, they have undertaken an assessment of their patient experience to better understand how patients perceive their care and treatment based on a variety of classifications including insured patients, Medicaid patients, and Medicare patients. They are ensuring that their values and culture align with building an inclusive culture. They have produced a number of Healing Begins with Listening videos that both highlight challenges and share best practices for promoting a culture of inclusion. Alan has spearheaded efforts to review human capital management policies and procedures to ensure that they are not bias against segments of the employee population. Their mission is to ensure that each and every employee is valued and treated with respect at all levels of the organization.

While much of the aforementioned work focuses on improving racial equity, they are committed to equity for all. They have changed their medical records to  reflect gender identity and name preferences for patients. They are hosting a virtual transgender job fair later this year to improve the opportunities available to members of the transgender community. In addition, they took steps to increase their minimum wage to $15 per hour in 2019 to provide a living wage for all employees. 

While the journey continues, MetroHealth 's DEI transformation and impact both internally and externally serves as a source of inspiration to us all.

UKG Pro Updates-Talent

 For our UKG Pro clients, expect product updates to follow a quarterly cycle for 2021. This change in release timing will allow for a more regular cadence for release updates allowing for better planning and update testing.

For those using UKG Talent Acquisition, there are some new BI reporting options that were made available in the February 12th release. The following categories are now available for BI reporting:

1. Onboarding: Employee Number

2. Recruiting: Opportunity Approval Details

3. Recruiting: Opportunity Approver Details

This information is being made available to client through BI reporting packages. The best source for details on these packages is the Learning Center.

Innovation and Sustainability Consult-A-Thon

 A former Bard MBA student, Reagan Richmond is an adjunct professor at Hofstra. they are offering this opportunity for Executive MBA student consulting. Details are below. Please reach out to Regan with any questions at reagan.richmond@hofstra.edu.