More than years into the pandemic, what has the workplace revolution revealed? From Day One’s one-day conference at Denver’s Ellie Caulkins Opera House brought together leading thinkers and top executives in HR and related fields for a conversation about how organizations can build stronger bonds of trust with their workers and their communities. The speakers included leaders from Western Union, VF Corp., Vail Resorts, Medtronic, Hunter Douglas, and the City and County of Denver. Among the timely questions: How can companies stay true to their core values, and accountable to their stakeholders, while making enormous changes? Highlights from the conference:

Weaving New Threads Into Today’s Talent Acquisition Fabric

As an institution, Western Union operates in more than 200 countries, has a 130-currency portfolio, and serves more than 150 million users; it was the first company that, in 1861, completed the first transcontinental telegraph.

Thus, it’s not surprising that, when it comes to talent acquisition, the company has kept diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at the forefront for some time, even though its first chief diversity and talent officer was only appointed in October 2021. Such person is Shannon Armbrecht, a HR professional who once dreamt of being like the heroic FBI trainee Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs.

“DEI is the foundation of our talent project. Originally, WU believed that, naturally, we’re a diverse company,” Armbrecht told journalist Spencer Campbell, features editor of 5280 magazine, during the conference’s opening fireside chat. “We move money in different currencies, and have employees all over the globe. When we realized we had an opportunity and needed to work at DEI, we still wanted it to be owned by the executive team.”

In fact, the main criterion for WU’s talent acquisition is: Can they represent the community that we serve? “WU’s clients need people who understand that what we need in the U.S. is different from what is needed in Argentina, Lithuania, or Costa Rica,” Western Union workers need to be “people who understand our customers, their needs, and live those lives, understand why moving money is so important: it’s about people,” she said.

Mostly, WU wanted to avoid having an individual come in and just dictate the course of action that employees and executives were then to follow. This outlook is a reflection of Armbrecht’s own disposition. During an early-career job in sales, in fact, she realized that, while ambitious, she was not competitive. “As soon as I started doing well, it started becoming a competitive environment,” she said. “That wasn’t for me.”

In fact, the DEI efforts informally started seven years ago, with an employee resource group (ERG) called Women@WU, which yielded a lot of development, and a lot of grassroots efforts. “We had great programs, we needed to measure them,” Armbrecht recalled. “Asking people to do it on the side was not going to move them forward.”

The three foundational goals consisted of increasing women in leadership (40% by 2025) racial and ethnic diversity (25% by 2025) and maintaining pay equity, and having DEI woven in the company’s very own fabric. It wasn’t easy at first. “Some of the places we started were just diverse slates and panels, and I had no idea how hard it’s gonna be to find talent, in a world where we’re used to–I'm just gonna put it out there–the privilege of white male being more educated,” she said. “When you put out a slate with X women and X diversity, sometimes it’s hard to find that talent. It takes longer, it takes time, it takes leaders who understand it”s the right thing to do.”

An early goal was that, by the time of a final interview to fill an opening, the slate had to have one qualified gender diverse and one qualified racially diverse individual; in turn, the deciding panel had to have at least a gender-diverse individual on it, and from other teams. That sounds simple enough, but it’s not always easy in practice. “It made a difference for us. It increased the diversity we were bringing into that panel and who we were hiring in the end, and we won’t work with vendors who won’t do that,” Armbrecht said.

Armbrecht observed that sometimes even people with the highest potential don’t necessarily come forward themselves due to their own circumstances. During the pandemic, for instance, caregiving responsibilities tended to fall even harder on women than they usually do.  “Oftentimes, an employee you see potential in, doesn’t see they have the time to give to home and work the same way,” she said. “In creating environments, creating benefits, creating opportunities for individuals to believe in themselves and want to go for that development, that promotion–it takes awareness.”

Awareness comes from insights and data. “Four years ago, we went into a more digitized insight strategy. We went to a monthly survey model: a few short questions each month, then we ask a more expanded one quarterly,” she said. “We know engagement is local, it’s local to your manager. You can pull these reports, and understand exactly what’s going on and take action very quickly.” Western Union’s leaders were, for instance, able to see how they were doing with burnout, Zoom fatigue, and ergonomic issues at the height of the pandemic. “We were able to get agile about the question. We put in different benefits: caregiver leave, mental-health-awareness apps, things we would not have understood or known had we not had the ability to have that agile strategy.”

So much of the progress was about this inclusion context, and it’s something for the long run, she said, beyond contingent and temporary measures. The approach presents a way to look at the end-to-end lifecycle of the employee and really think about how inclusion is built into it. “There’s such opportunity,” she said, “to use the data and for the team to be understanding of the impact they have on each other and the impact they have on people from the moment we advertise to them to bringing them in the door, developing them along the way, and hopefully providing them opportunity if they’re going to leave us to get that bigger, better role somewhere else.”–By Angelica Frey

Building a Truly Inclusive Company Culture: Beyond the Buzzwords

When protests over the murder of George Floyd flashed across the country, Minneapolis was ground zero. Executives at Medtronic, which has its U.S. headquarters in that city, knew instantly that their response was crucial to supporting their 95,000 employees. “It’s a critical time for our company, and for our employees to see how we would show up in that situation,” said Kate Langhorst, an HR director at Medtronic, the largest medical-device company in the world. “Our organization really had to look inside and ask, ‘Do we have the expertise to really address what's going on in our employee populations in our communities?’”

Langhorst and four other HR leaders spoke on a panel titled, “Is Your Company Developing an Inclusive Culture?” moderated by Denver Post reporter Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton, which focused on how companies can examine their DEI efforts to make their workplaces better-suited to diversity.

The Floyd protests and subsequent events have prompted many companies to reexamine the effectiveness of existing DEI initiatives. Teresa Hopke is CEO for North America of Talking Talent, a global coaching firm that inspires inclusive cultures. “As a consultant, I think that there were a lot of really well-intentioned things that came as a result of what happened with the protests and the murder of George Floyd. Organizations really stepped up and wanted to do something. But I think that a lot of them have missed the mark. [Efforts] can become transactional, not transformational.”

For Jamie Alvarez, director of corporate communications at Vail Resorts, the Floyd murder prompted some hard questions. “The ski and snowboard industry is not diverse, it is not the most diverse sport. And it’s not growing, there’s not new people coming in. So really the first step was acknowledging that we are part of the problem. And asking ‘How do we start to look internally and do this work internally so that we can better lead the industry externally?’”

For Vail Resorts, which has 40 resorts in 16 states and four countries, investment signals action. The company has focused on fewer catchphrases and more meaningful initiatives. “LGBTQ health care is a good example of that,” Alvarez said. “But specifically for our industry, we’re also thinking about affordable housing, health care and access, mental health access. We recently announced a $175 million investment into the employee experience that included raising our minimum wage to $20 for specific skill sets across all of our North American resorts. We have a couple of resorts outside of Philadelphia; their pay went from $7.25 an hour to $20. And that’s meaningful.”

Monica Jackson, VP of global inclusion and diversity at Eaton Corp., agrees that action extends beyond terms. “We all know that allyship isn’t a new thing–we used to call it sponsorship, we used to call it advocacy. I think it really goes back to the crux and the foundation of, What are  we solving for? Then the resulting actions don’t feel as much like an initiative or flavor of the month, because it’s solving for true business.”

Walmart’s much-criticized and hastily recalled Juneteenth ice cream fiasco provides a perfect example, says Eaton. “How does that [ice cream] tie back to what you’re solving for? What is the challenge? Sometimes it’s over-engineered, just doing something to say you’re doing something, but it doesn’t really relate back and solve the true problem.”

Medtronic let its African Descent Network ERG lead the way on observing Juneteenth, following their request that the new federal holiday be used to educate employees about what the date actually commemorates. “If you don’t know the history, if you don’t know why different things are important to different populations,” said Langhorst, “it’s hard to be an educated ally.”

“I don’t need an organization to be my ally as much as I want them to pay me fairly,” said McKendree Hickory, PhD, head of facilitation at the leadership-training consultancy LifeLabs Learning. “I want them to hire equitably. I want them to offer the health care that myself and my family and my employees need. And so I think it’s even less about ‘What are we trying to become?’ and rather like ‘How do we embed this [DEI] into the infrastructure of our organization?’”

And how to embed this, to move beyond fads and flavors? Eaton Corp. has instituted a series of ongoing listening sessions where senior leaders, who are typically accustomed to doing most of the talking, listen to the concerns of rank-and-file employees. Hopke adds that it’s important to instill a culture of listening, where managers check in one-on-one to support workers on an individual level.

Hiring and retention practices bear reexamining, as well. LifeLabs has opened its pipeline, examining what truly makes facilitators successful–for example, the ability to engage a crowd–and expanding beyond psychology degrees to hire people with backgrounds such as improv comedy. Vail Resorts is attempting to do something similar, eliminating ski and snowboarding questions when interviewing for positions that don’t require expertise on the slopes. “Do I need to know if our best accountant can ski?” said Alverez. “No.” And Medtronic is examining how to support employees after onboarding to eliminate the ‘leaky bucket’ when diverse employees, unsupported by the company culture, quickly exit.

Hopke thinks these changes are key. “We need to figure out how to do this differently,” she said. “We can’t keep checking the box on programs and trying to think that we’re going to solve this. I call it a back-door approach: to start to change our cultures without people thinking we’re forcing some big DEI initiative down their throat. We can teach people to be more empathetic, more curious, more compassionate, and more human. And that is going to get us to an inclusive workplace.”–By Cynthia Barnes

Do Your Employees Feel Valued? How to Improve Retention in a Hybrid Workplace

When the pandemic hit the U.S. in March 2020, the changes it brought to the workplace were revolutionary–and many of them are here to stay. A September 2021 Gallup poll found that 45% of full-time U.S. employees worked from home either all the time (25%) or part of the time (20%). It’s estimated that by 2025, 36.2 million Americans will be working remotely, an 87% increase from pre-pandemic levels. While much has been written about the Great Resignation, surveys show that workers aren’t leaving work–they’re leaving jobs (and careers) where they don’t feel valued.

Moderated by journalist Tamara Chuang, who writes a column for the Colorado Sun call “What’s Working,” a panel of executives explored ways to foster community, cohesion, engagement, and a sense of belonging among workers–no matter where they’re physically located.

Amy Cohen, a VP of total rewards for Hunter Douglas, a leading maker of window coverings and architectural producets, was one of the reshufflers, joining the company during the pandemic. “For me, [the job change] was just a growth opportunity that would have happened with a pandemic or not. But one thing coming into a new organization during that time, I was asking a lot of questions. ‘How do our employees feel right now?’ [Hunter Douglas] had never done a survey to see what employees really wanted, whether they’d rather have X or Y. And that was so valuable, hugely informative. For the first time, we could use data directly from our employees to then tie that back to what we were going to roll out as part of our annual benefits packages.”

While Hunter Douglas’ office support workers transitioned to a hybrid-work model, manufacturing staff need to be in a facility by necessity. The company switched the manufacturing schedule to four, 10-hour days, to offer flexibility within the onsite framework, and that schedule has been well-received. (Of the almost half of American workers either actively seeking or contemplating new jobs, 27% say they’re seeking flexibility in scheduling.) “Employees really, really enjoy that opportunity to now have three-day weekends. And that came from us really listening, and then doing something about it. That time off was important to people wasn’t surprising,” Cohen said. “But what was surprising was disability parental leave–employees found that really important. So we now realize that’s an area for us to invest in, and to enhance those programs.”

Bonnie Dowling, an associate partner with global consulting firm McKinsey & Company, agrees that listening to employees is key, and praised Hunter Douglas’ scheduling shift. “Flexibility has always been really important. In 2019, before the pandemic, the No. 1 ask of employees was for flexibility. That outpaced things like equal development opportunities, or mentorship or sponsorship or equal pay. But I don’t think that all of the employees who ranked it as No. 1 meant the kind of flexibility that we have today during the pandemic, which for those of us who work at a computer sometimes means being in front of a video conference screen for 12 or 13 hours straight. That’s flexibility to wear pajamas, not flexibility to do anything else. So when we think about flexibility, we have to think about not just where we work, but when we work and how we work. And when we expand that definition to include those elements, we can absolutely figure out flexible options for our on site staff as well.” As for Dowling’s company, they’ve moved to a model they call ‘purposeful presence’ that has McKinsey seriously evaluating which activities truly benefit from in-person presence, and which can be accomplished just as well from an employee’s home or a coffee shop.

For Carla Anthony, director of HR at the Department of Public Safety for the City and County of Denver, the concept of making decisions based on ‘purposeful presence’ really resonates. “That’s pretty much what we’re doing with the Department of Safety. We have responsibility for the police, the fire department, sheriffs, 911, community corrections, and our gang-reduction unit, with three unions and about 4,500 employees. And in our organization, we differentiate between our first responders and our professional staff. So of course, our first responders have 24/7, various 24/7 schedules, and our professional staff operates very similarly to what you've described, where, generally speaking, we’d like to have them in the office two days a week, but it really depends on the type of work that they’re doing. And we do make exceptions–if it’s not necessary for someone to come in the office at all, then we work with that.”

Judith Almendra, VP of human capital and talent acquisition at customer-experience giant TTEC, also saw her company turned upside down at the beginning of the pandemic. “TTEC has about 60,000 employees globally,” she said. “Pre-pandemic, about 5% of them were remote. Today about 80% are working remotely. So we had to develop different models. It was always very taboo to work from home. So one of the things that was very important for us was to develop a program where our employees have the option to work a couple hours here and there. Because I think to your point, flexibility is just more than just being at your home, it is really like being able to work from whatever you want, being able to work the hours that you need. So that for us is going to be very revolutionary in our industry. It creates a lot of complexities from a technology standpoint. But the digital transformation in this industry has been accelerated by the pandemic significantly,” Almendra said.

Prior to the pandemic, Ball Corp., which produces aluminum products ranging from soda cans to space shuttle components, had a very in-office culture, says Danae Atkins, a director of HR business-partner functions for the company. “From the very beginning, there was a real clear acknowledgement and affirmation that our plant employees or aerospace employees working on classified projects were really our own frontline workers and heroes. So there is a lot of acknowledgment, a lot of very public recognition and private recognition there within plants, leader messages, leader visits, etc. For our plant population, specifically, we have a really big safety culture. So you'll go into any of our manufacturing plants around the world and you'll see signs–in different languages depending on the location–that will say, ‘I'll watch your back, you watch mine.’ So the whole thing is to go home safe every day, right? Like I value you, as an employee, you value me as a team member as well, and we want to make sure that we each go home safe to our families every day. So when Covid and safety precautions came along with that, it was very natural just to fold that into our overall culture of safety, which was already so important to us.”

Continued Atkins: “What we've tried to stress is [that] culture is not just the four walls of a physical building. Culture is so much more than that:  tangibles and intangibles. And so we’ve done some real concerted things during that time to build and strengthen our culture. And I feel like we’re coming out stronger, actually, in the final days of our employee-engagement surveys. And we’ll keep reinventing how we do this and keep going forward in that way.”

Dowling agreed, adding: “With the current labor market, there’s no way that you can just dictate things anymore. It has to be different things that work for different employees. If your culture is dependent on the posters that people see in the elevator, that’s marketing, not culture. Culture is about the way that your managers interact with their teams every day. It’s the way your teams and your colleagues interact with each other. Every day you live in you breathe your culture, regardless of whether or not you’re onsite with each other or remote. So it’s a matter of investing and prioritizing it and the way that you are anchored your entire philosophy, and the core components of your culture around empathy. That’s huge.”–By Cynthia Barnes

How High-Performing Workplaces Can Show Compassion, Too

Back in 2017, in a foreshadowing of the work-from-home revolution, university professor Robert Kelly was explaining South Korean politics live on the BBC, only to be hilariously upstaged by his two exuberant toddlers and, eventually, by his frantic wife. In those pre-pandemic, primarily pre-video conference days, the innocent blooper went viral. Fortunately, the episode was greeted largely with empathy and compassion. Turns out, we were all soon to need a lot of both. Kelly suffered a little embarrassment, but when workers are regularly expected to deliver maximum effort in new circumstances, retention depends on empathy and compassion. What does this kind of sensitivity look like in high-pressure workplaces?

To Anna Robinson, CEO and founder of the mentorship and leadership platform Ceresa, the answer is pretty simple. “A compassionate workplace is one that focuses on the human being before the human resource.” Robinson is excited about remote work because of its possibilities for underrepresented talent. “It should work, really, in the favor of greater diversity and representation. Yet, I think what we’re seeing is that it’s hard to maintain compassion in the same way when we’re remote. It’s so easy, when you’re on Zoom all the time, to just forget the small talk and the checking in with each other.”

Robinson, along with four other experts, explored post-pandemic challenges in a panel conversation on balancing productivity with empathy, moderated by Denver Post politics reporter Saja Hindi.

Donald Deas liked Robinson’s answer. Said Deas, a director and HR business partner for E.W. Scripps Co., one of the largest local TV broadcasters: “I would add to that and say from a health care perspective, we need to be high-performing in order for us to do that we need to lift our people up: Mind, body and spirit, every person, every neighborhood, whole and healthy.”

Jennifer Fairweather, the chief HR officer for Colorado’s Jefferson County, said her definition of compassion is “when we see people as humans and not as things. Sometimes working in government, people see us as the government, or we sometimes might see our community members as ‘those people.’ But when we see each other as human-to-human, we recognize the differences and the challenges that we all have. And then we can have compassion and empathy.”

Putting those precepts into practice, though, takes work, not words. Health care systems saw a huge strain on their resources during the pandemic, especially in staffing. For Amy Carris, director of people and culture development at Centura Health, this required revamping their talent acquisition. “We knew our folks on the frontline needed help,” she said. “We instituted a rapid hiring process, specifically for clinical roles. Our recruiters could extend an offer immediately to the candidate, provided they met expectations criteria and licensure for the role.” Leaders also needed support. “We saw that our leaders were investing so much in the care and the well-being of our staff that they were forgetting to take care of themselves. It was eye-opening that in addition to all of our benefits, all the resources, something that we really needed to do is give leaders permission to take care of themselves, in addition to taking care of our associates.”

Car rental giant Hertz underwent major structural changes during the pandemic, laying off about 16,000 workers and filing for bankruptcy. Jennifer Cockrum, SVP of HR, and her team faced the challenges head-on. “Before the pandemic, we communicated with our employees largely through in-person meetings and town halls. Globally, we relied on management and union stewards who spoke our employees’ languages. The first thing we did was send postcards to people’s homes. Communicated through the mail, because that wasn’t shut down. We initiated translation services, focused on meeting our employees where they are. And we said, ‘Thank you.’ At Thanksgiving of 2020, we were in the depths of bankruptcy. And we gave everybody a gratitude bonus. We didn’t have money to do that, but we did it anyway. That came from a very genuine place, thanking our employees for helping us through such a difficult situation.”

The news media played a huge role during such an unprecedented time, largely shifting to remote locations. “We had to re-engage with our employees from a totally different perspective of coming into brick and mortar on a day-to-day basis,'' said Deas. “Having people work from home, trying to put on newscasts, as well as doing stories out of their apartments or houses. And the folks that were in the field, we had to modify that as they engaged with the public with masks and have them fully protected with PPE so they could stay healthy. So we modified our way of doing business to suit that environment.”

Although their diverse businesses modified in different ways–surgery can’t be performed remotely, rental cars essentially stopped selling–all the organizations drastically reevaluated metrics for performance reviews, shifted responsibilities and hours, ramped up personal check-ins and employee support, and communicated, communicated, communicated.

Deas stressed the importance of engaging employees. “So where did the best ideas come from? Do they come from you, the ‘higher ups’? The answer is no. The best answers come from our employees.”

Some policies and practices will eventually go back to business as usual, but some good changes will remain. “There are a lot of negative stories that can be told,” said Deas. “But there are also a lot of positive stories to be shared, and that’s the space that we’re in now. And that’s in those community stories. Our journalists and photographers could identify with those, because a lot of the issues that they were going through [during the pandemic] were the same things people in the community were experiencing. We wanted to capture that, humanize some of that broadcasting. And we’re going to continue capturing that humanity in the community, and showing that people are still doing great things during these times.”–By Cynthia Barnes

Enriching Your Company culture With Allyship, Advocacy and Belonging

“It all starts with listening,” VF Corp.’s Lauren Guthrie said of her role as VP of global inclusion, diversity, equity, and action (IDEA) in a fireside chat at the conference with Denver Post reporter Elizabeth Hernandez. Guthrie’s approach builds on the familiar term DEI with an added element of “action,” rooted in deep listening.

Guthrie’s passion for storytelling an