WORKPLACE CULTURE
the benefit of people being innovative, you get products to market faster, you can do fewer offsite meetings working on communication. The place is just lined up. I’ve run businesses through my whole career, and now I’m in a field that has been driven by human resource professionals, but I’m a business person, so I’m always thinking from the leadership point of view. But I am saying the same thing that the human resource professionals said, which is that people matter. Boy, do they really matter. And now I get it. They really matter. It’s made me a much better leader, and a much better communicator to other CEOs about the steps they need to take. Not their HR person, not their diversity person: the steps they need to take to create an environment where people feel supported through the change. What, on a day-to-day basis, does supporting employees through change actually look like?
TRUST INDEX SURVEY Women (percent who agree)
Men (percent who agree)
MB: You have to do more education and development. You have to bring your whole company along so that they understand how to run the business like it’s theirs. You have to be frequently educating and getting everybody on the same page about why the business is doing what it’s doing. It’s really a back-to-basics movement. Leaders assume people know. People don’t. They’ve been hired, they do a task, and they start working a ton of hours on that task. They really don’t understand why they’re doing it in terms of purpose or business strategy. You have to have frequent communications letting people know that this is why we’re launching this product, here’s what it does, and why. This is what it’s going to do for the customer, and the market opportunities. You should have your people having an experience once a month where they’re getting an education and getting developed at the same time about the basic parts of the business. That’s a way of supporting people through the change. You don’t
have one group that gets it and one group that doesn’t. You’re bringing everybody along, and that’s how you let them know you care about all of them. That’s a conscious act, a conscious decision, and you need to follow up on it. A lot of the best companies have a practice of having workgroups of people coming together with the role of connecting leaders to employees — we call ours the People Posse. They let leadership know what’s going on with employees and let employees know what’s going on with leaders. And a great place to work isn’t just the leaders’ responsibility. Every employee has that responsibility. You can’t just have leaders working on respecting employees, you’ve got to have it both ways. How do you see or understand the relationship between being a great place to work in all these ways we’ve been talking about and other forms of stakeholder responsibility or sustainability or corporate stewardship?
When Bush analyzed survey results from some of the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list, he found large disparities in the answers given to certain questions along gender lines as well as by ethnicity, age, and other dimensions. A sample of gender disparities from one anonymous company’s survey is below.
78%
Managers avoid playing favorites
91%
If I am unfairly treated, I believe I’ll be given a fair shake if I appeal
84% 95%
Management is approachable, easy to talk with
87%
Management’s actions match its words
86%
96%
95% 88%
This is a psychologically and emotionally healthy place to work
96% 0
50
MARCH / APRIL 2017
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CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE
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