Developing Quality Conversations About Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Posted on

by Zoe Kinias, INSEAD Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour; Modupe Akinola, Columbia Business School; Erin Kelly, MIT Sloan; and Michael Norton, Harvard Business School

Organisations – including business schools – are increasingly focused on expanding their DEI capabilities. Consider these best practices for productive conversations around DEI.

For decades, it has been commonplace for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) advocates to feel their voices were unheard and strategies not acted upon by their organisations’ senior leadership. Fortunately, that seems to have changed, at least for now. The killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter upsurge that followed, as well as the manifold inequalities laid bare by the Covid-19 pandemic, have surely contributed to what promises to be a banner year for corporate consciousness around DEI.

This consciousness and DEI focus are also on the rise at business schools, as demonstrated by the sense of optimism pervading the third semi-annual meeting of DEI business school educators held on 24 May 2021. In the two short years since we initiated these meetings in 2019, participating business schools have made significant progress in integrating a DEI lens into teaching. Attendees reported positive developments including heightened DEI presence in MBA orientation, core curriculum and electives. Additionally, business schools have also begun incorporating DEI into leadership positions, with Dean and Vice Dean roles established to ensure sustained progress.

However, one critical element for making sustained progress in DEI is increasing agility in DEI-related conversations. While the current climate has increased awareness of DEI dynamics, being able to discuss these dynamics and incorporating maximally inclusive engagement within these conversations is a necessary precursor to progress. As educators, we want to inspire such conversations, creating “a-ha moments” that prompt participants to recognise (and improve) where they – and their organisations – stand on DEI. Below we suggest a few ways to do so, as revealed at our most recent meeting.

Three steps to quality DEI conversations

Continue reading →

Are You Asking the Right Questions of Your Data Team?

Posted on

by Caroline Zimmerman, INSEAD Research Associate, Theodoros Evgeniou, INSEAD Professor of Decision Sciences and Technology Management, Daragh Kelly, VP of Data & Analytics at Burberry, and Joyce Weng, Managing Director of Bulgari UK

Asking great questions is perhaps the most underappreciated skill of great data-driven leaders.

People often associate the term “data literacy” with mastering a litany of technical skills: SQL for data querying, Python for data analysis and Tableau for data visualisation, to name a few. However, one skill that is less discussed and has great power to scale data-guided decision making across the organisation is far more basic, though not necessarily straightforward to learn: the ability to ask great questions of a data team.

While this skill can be about setting big strategic directions, it is more often about defining narrower, possibly daily, requests for the team. But what, exactly, are good questions, and how does one go about skilling up an organisation in asking them? With two players in the luxury retail space, Daragh Kelly, VP of Data & Analytics at Burberry, and Joyce Weng, MD of Bulgari UK, we discussed the answer to this and other questions at a recent INSEAD Tech Talk on enabling data-guided leadership and decision making. You can watch the full recording here or continue reading for the key takeaways from our discussion.

What makes a great question for a data team?

Business stakeholders, particularly those with strategic responsibilities, can vastly improve the quality of their analytical teams’ output by asking them great questions at the outset of a project. These should be:

  1. Strategically important. If the question doesn’t support the organisation’s three to five large strategic bets, it’s probably not worth pursuing.
  2. Well-bounded. Take the example of a large TV channel. The question “How can I make my shows more successful?” is too large in scope for a data team to approach it analytically. A more specific – and therefore answerable – question is, “Should I be doing more or fewer science-fiction shows?”
  3. Actionable. Only questions whose answers can be acted upon are worth the investment; otherwise, they just yield interesting pieces of information that no one can do anything about.
  4. Grounded. Starting the research process by having a firm understanding of our existing insight on the topic is an obvious, efficient, fast and much neglected starting position. New questions should be grounded in existing knowledge, rather than dreamt up in a vacuum.

Continue reading →

2 must-haves for a strong hybrid work plan from a Stanford expert

Posted on

By: Kathryn Mayer

Offering flexible work options is just the beginning in today’s hot job market, remote work expert Nicholas Bloom says

Pre-COVID, remote work was embraced only by a handful of employers. Now, of course, that model has grown exponentially due to the pandemic—and it will likely stay that way for the foreseeable future.

Working from home completely exploded,” Nicholas Bloom, William Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University and a remote work expert, said Tuesday during an HRE webinar. As the country reopens and employers consider return-to-office plans, hybrid models of work—in which employees work part-time at home and part-time in the office—will be the most popular trend, he said. Research shows the majority of firms, around 80%, plan to embrace a hybrid work model where employees will work three days in the office and two days at home.

Big-name employers including Apple, Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase and more are on that list. “It makes sense; firms are pretty happy with it and employees really want to work from home,” he said.

 

Further cementing remote work’s place: an employee-driven market where employee preference on how they work will surely be listened to by smart employers as they try to retain and attract talent.

Given how hot the U.S. labor markets are, if you are not offering hybrid, not offering any work-from-home post-pandemic, you’re risking losing quite a large number of your employees,” Bloom said.

So, how can employers best make the model work going forward? Listening to employee feedback and utilizing the right technology are two keys, he said.

“Surveys are incredibly important,” he said. “You need to find out what employees want. It may seem obvious, but there is a huge variance of what people want,” he said, noting that a number of employees want to work in the office full-time, another large number want to work at home full-time and the rest are “somewhere in between” and want to have the hybrid model.

Employee feedback also is important because it allows employers to get data to help explain their decision-making when it comes to work models. “We hear employers complaining about employee complaints and not taking their desires into account,” he explained. Collecting data on exactly what they want makes it “much easier to defend your decision.”

Meanwhile, embracing the right technology also will ensure remote work’s success. Such technology tools as video calls, through providers like Zoom, WebEx and Microsoft Teams, and cloud services, which allow employees to share files or edit documents in real-time, make it fairly seamless for many employees to work remotely. That’s different from a decade or two ago when employees relied on dial-up, setting up conference call numbers and other challenges to working outside of the office.

“If you go back 20 years, working from home was painful,” Bloom said. “It was a lot of telephone calls, emailing documents—very slow, very inefficient.”

Going forward, there will be even better technology—including virtual reality, better screen-sharing capabilities, better equipment and laptops—that will likely further propel the popularity of remote and hybrid working and make it even easier for both employers and employees. Even since the pandemic began, new tech features emerged that have been helpful for employers, he said.

“Thinking as a company looking to the future, it’s clear that technology for working from home is rapidly improving,” he said. “A number of things will make this easier in the future.”

Source: hrexecuitve.com

 

What is your personal leadership brand?

Posted on

by Adam Bryant

To help build authenticity, be clear on the specific values that have guided your career and that you expect others to embrace.

Early on in our careers, we are schooled in the importance of the elevator pitch, so that we can deliver a concise answer if somebody important we meet in passing asks, “What are you working on?” or “What do you do here?” The succinct sales pitch is also an essential skill for entrepreneurs taking turns in front of an audience of investors: they have to be able to capture their killer idea in a dozen or so words.

But in our consulting work with senior leaders, we find there is a specific type of elevator pitch that executives often overlook. It’s the answer to the questions “So what kind of leader are you?” and “What should we know about your leadership style?” Having a thoughtful reply at the ready could be a factor in landing a promotion. But more crucially, providing clarity about your leadership style will help you to build trust with your team. Think of it as your personal leadership brand—what you stand for, including the values that guide your behaviors as a leader, and what you expect from others.

It’s not that people don’t have anything to say in response to these questions. Some will volunteer that they believe in “servant leadership,” or that they are results-driven or believe in excellence and integrity.

Continue reading →

7 secrets of IT talent magnets

Posted on

By Stacy Collett

From offering meaningful work to embracing hybrid environments, CIOs whose organizations have established virtuous IT recruiting cycles share tips on how to consistently attract IT talent.

As the war for IT talent rages on, some companies seem to be staying out of the trenches, even when it comes to the most sought-after skills.

CPA firm Plante Moran fills open IT positions in 48 days on average — from job post to onboard date — even for the hardest-to-fill roles in application development, data analytics, cybersecurity, and cloud engineering. That includes several rounds of interviews and testing to ensure a good fit. By comparison, most employers in 2020 took an average of 69 days to fill a tech role, according to a survey by recruiting cloud platform iCIMS.

Owens Corning often hires outstanding IT talent, even without an open position. “If an exceptional technologist approaches HR, or an IT staffer offers a great referral, we just go ahead and hire them, and often when we don’t have a role that we’re shopping,” says CIO Steve Zerby. “We build roles around people; we don’t put people in roles.”

These and other nontechnology companies have created a virtuous recruiting cycle in which IT talent is likely to seek out its opportunities, rather than the organization constantly having to do the selling to top candidates.

Attracting great talent requires more than a great compensation package, although IDG’s IT Salary Survey 2021 shows that tech workers most often seek new jobs for higher compensation (61%). But they’re also seeking career advancement (47%), interesting work (38%), and personal fulfillment.

Continue reading →