4 HR Leaders Talk: Creating Inclusive Workplaces
Experience is a great teacher but to learn exponentially, it is far better to learn from the experiences of others. Crescendo spoke with Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) advocates across Canada to get their advice on how to implement D&I initiatives, and the tools that can help.
We’ve broken these interviews down to their core concepts, but you can jump directly to the full interviews by clicking on names below:
- Kristen Liesch — Partner and Strategist Women’s Work Institute
Kristen Liesch’s unique academic background informs her methodology at Women’s Work Institute, which combines practices and theories from the social sciences, education and interdisciplinary humanities. She has partnered with organizations across a range of industries to improve organizational structure, productivity, and cohesion. National non-profit, health care and educational institutions have benefited from Kristen’s ability to identify gaps and implement effective solutions. - Danielle Strang — Head of People Operations at Jobber
Danielle Strang is a talent strategist, a marketing enthusiast and a disrupter at heart. Taking a non-traditional and opportunistic approach to her own career, she stepped away from years of corporate HR experience to launch herself into the executive recruiting industry. Now, as the Head of People Operations for Jobber, she is passionate about sharing her learnings from the executive search industry to help modernize HR and recruiting. She focuses on design thinking to help shape a culture that wholly considers the employee experience. - ZJ Hadley, Employee Success Business Partner at Tulip Retail
ZJ Hadley (she/her) is an HR strategist and community builder who is passionate about diversity and inclusion. She is the co-founder of The People People Group, an online and sometimes IRL community of Canadian HR and Talent Acquisition professionals; an HR Business Partner at Tulip Retail (one of LinkedIn’s Top Startups 2018); and a budding sommelier. - Jeff Waldman — Founder of SocialHR Camp
Jeff Waldman founded SocialHRCamp, an experiential learning platform that targets HR/Recruitment practitioners who are in the “early majority” stage of social media and HR/Recruitment technology adoption. Camps have taken place in Vancouver, Edmonton, Montreal, Kitchener-Waterloo, Toronto, San Francisco, Chicago, Omaha, Los Angeles, Boston and Singapore. Camps target HR practitioners with a wide range of skills relating to technology, from beginner to advanced.
“As our world continues to become increasingly international,” says Waldman, “it’s more important for organizations to embrace diversity and build inclusive workspaces.”
In our conversations, each advocate’s advice featured shared themes:
Cultivating Empathy and Engagement
A great starting point, suggests Liesch, is to listen — and listen to learn.
“Really listen to your people. All your people. Not just the people you think you should listen to. And listen well.
“Don’t listen to interrupt, to argue, to defend, to confirm, to tick a box.
“That way, not only do you gain valuable insights that can equip you to become more efficient and prosperous, but you have the opportunity to encounter an individual’s singularity and see things through their unique perspective. There is ample evidence that shows when we get to know a person who is different from us, we become more attuned to their experience and act, in many cases, in a way that is more just.”
“I have believed for many years,” adds Waldman, “that diversity and inclusion only work together, versus in isolation of one another. Diversity is being invited to the party, and inclusion is being asked to dance.”
Employee engagement tools can range from applications that encourage conversation and collaboration to team recognition and rewards programs. Here are some for starters:
· Kudos (recognition)
· Achievers (recognition)
· Slack (conversation and collaboration)
· Trello (collaboration)Developing and Mentoring
Interrupting Bias
“One of the things that I recommend doing is talking to people about unconscious bias,” says Hadley.
“Our brain is programmed to want to work with people who look and act like us. People want to think that they are unbiased but if you analyze the data, there are mechanisms that our brains use to make decisions subconsciously that lead to unconscious bias. Once you acknowledge this bias, you can start to have more productive conversations.
“At Tulip Retail, we make diversity metrics a part of our OKRs and that has helped us drive real change. We have two C level executives, our CFO and our CRO, who are both women, which makes our executive team almost equal in terms of gender diversity.”
Liesch adds that you can interrupt bias using tech tools to help bridge the gap between intent and action when it comes to recruiting, hiring and promoting. Here are a few to check out:
· Applied
· TalVista
· Textio
Capturing and Analyzing Data
Frequent data capture, analysis and publication are critical to an organization’s success, says Liesch.
“Who are you hiring, in what numbers, to what salaries, who is being promoted, when and to what salaries? Allow data to identify symptoms.”
From there, follow through on reviewing and implementing changes in policies, procedures, or even physical work environments.
Liesch stresses the importance of consistency and strategic linking of the overall objectives and D&I strategy throughout the entire organization.
She suggests appointing “a D&I champion (such as a Chief Diversity Officer) who has teeth at the decision-making table and who has the mandate to educate themselves on research-based strategies.”
Kristen Liesch — Partner and Strategist Women’s Work Institute
Kristen Liesch’s unique academic background informs her methodology at Women’s Work Institute, which combines practices and theories from the social sciences, education and interdisciplinary humanities. She has partnered with organizations across a range of industries to improve organizational structure, productivity, and cohesion. National non-profit, health care and educational institutions have benefited from Kristen’s ability to identify gaps and implement effective solutions.
Tell us about your background and how you became an advocate for D&I.
The journey that has brought me to the work I do today has by no means been linear. I grew up in a relatively conservative religious community in a homogenous small city in central Alberta. In that context, I learned the incredible power of empathy to create and foster community and forge connections across diverse individuals and groups.
Later, as a teacher in rural Alberta, I saw firsthand the divergence of possibility — an expansion of possibility versus a narrowing of possibility — that was reflective of a child’s socioeconomic status, and the injustice of a system that saw underrepresented groups disadvantaged. This paradigm was doubly evident to me when I taught in the public school system in Auckland, New Zealand.
In this role, I worked to see this divergence narrowed through innovative inclusive education programming that considered the diversity of the student population and emphasized an empathetic learning process. My trajectory into the space where equality champions were working was truly determined when I was pursuing my PhD.
I remember very distinctly holding my infant daughter in one arm, and reading firsthand accounts written by women who, more than a century ago, fought for legal personhood. On a day-to-day basis, however, turn-of-the-century women were also fighting for many of the rights, privilege and access that we continue to demand today. This made me angry. Really angry.
Looking down at my daughter, I knew that I had to do whatever I could to accelerate change. I’ve spent the past six years researching, refining and implementing a systems-based methodology for change.
Today, my partner at Women’s Work Institute, Anna, and I work everyday to help leaders and organizations connect the dots between equality, effectiveness, and prosperity.
Danielle Strang — Head of People Operations at Jobber
Danielle Strang is a talent strategist, a marketing enthusiast and a disrupter at heart. Taking a non-traditional and opportunistic approach to her own career, she stepped away from years of corporate HR experience to launch herself into the executive recruiting industry.
Now, as the Head of People Operations for Jobber, she is passionate about sharing her learnings from the executive search industry to help modernize HR and recruiting. She focuses on design thinking to help shape a culture that wholly considers the employee experience.
Tell us more about your background and how you became an advocate for D&I.
I was raised in a rural environment and came to Edmonton to go to university. I did my degree in marketing and accidentally fell into the world of talent, culture and HR.
I have worked in construction companies, architectural firms and massive global organizations of up to 25,000 employees. My career has been far from linear and the biggest thing it has taught me is a good business sense.
Why and how I became an advocate for D&I is when I realized that there was a paradigm shift happening in the relationship that people had with work. If given a choice between working for an organization that values and believes in the same things as I do versus an organization that makes me question if they value me, people will always choose the organization that runs parallel with their value system every single time.
ZJ Hadley — Employee Success Business Partner at Tulip Retail
ZJ Hadley (she/her) is an HR strategist and community builder who is passionate about diversity and inclusion. She is the co-founder of The People People Group, an online and sometimes IRL community of Canadian HR and Talent Acquisition professionals; an HR Business Partner at Tulip Retail (one of LinkedIn’s Top Startups 2018); and a budding sommelier.
Tell us more about your background and how you became an advocate for D&I.
I grew up in the foster care system and did not have any kind of family support. As a result, I went through a lot of challenges and struggled with poverty and homelessness.
D&I is an issue that is really close to my heart. I want to find other people who are qualified, great candidates who will be amazing additions to the company but who normally get overlooked because they didn’t have the same opportunities in their early life.
I know from experience that those kind of disadvantages can disproportionately affect the lives of underrepresented minorities and that’s why I am focused on those communities.
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