“Fake” A Diverse Culture Until You Make It
A few weeks ago, as I was debriefing with our customers on their FlexTeam experience, I noticed an interesting trend. While all customers raved about quality of our work product, our simple process, etc., the female customers used additional phrases of appreciation for us beyond just efficient execution of their projects.
“I loved feeling the team support from women…”
“I felt comfortable asking because…”
“It was great to have a sounding board before I went into…”
It dawned on me — perhaps FlexTeam could be a tool for corporations to use to battle their diversity issues, particularly where it comes to retaining and advancing highly-qualified women. While I am not a corporate diversity expert by any means, I believe that companies, by adding teams of women like ours to their evolving diversity playbook, can accelerate their pace of change.
We Will Not Be Alive to Witness the Change
At this point, most people recognize that companies, especially in technology, face enormous diversity issues. In addition to a variety of problems at companies themselves, the culture itself (ahem, Uber) pushes out women from their workforce.
“…workplace conditions, a lack of access to key creative roles, and a sense of feeling stalled in one’s career…” Why is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women (The Atlantic)
“…the dispiriting sense of isolation that comes when a woman is the only female on her team or at her rank…the ‘mystery’ around career advancement.” Stopping the Exodus of Women in Science (Harvard Business Review)
Over the last 5–10 years, companies like Google, Intel, and Pinterest have earmarked large budgets to spend on diversity initiatives. They are making efforts not only to hire more diversely, but to also keep track of their retention data, offer biases training, fund workshops, create support groups, provide mentorship programs, and implement more women-friendly policies — all great efforts in the right direction.
Even with all of these steps, women are still bleeding out and diversity numbers have not improved much yet. Why?
While many believe women in tech and leadership is a pipeline problem, we, at FlexTeam, believe the issue is in retention of mid-career women. Fifteen-plus years ago, there were plenty of female classmates in our MIT engineering classes. Since then, many of them have dropped out of the traditional workforce because, in trying to find time for their families in the middle of their careers, they had to choose between two options — keep working full time or leave the workforce altogether to spend time with their families. Although companies like ours exist to keep these women engaged in during this period, women who want to (and can!) stay engaged full-time in corporations are still leaving the technology and leadership track.
The simplest and most frustrating answer is that the fundamental culture at these companies are not great for women. When an individual is faced with decisions about balancing both their family and their profession, the workplace culture often pushes them to concede the latter in some fashion. And no matter how much change is encouraged through these diversity programs, studies show that true and meaningful change actually only happens when a certain % of women (3 out of 10) are attained and sustained at every level of the organization. But how can a company (let alone an entire industry) retain women without a culture change or change their culture without retaining their women employees?
According to Women in the Workplace 2015 Report by Lean In and McKinsey, this is why the pace of change is ridiculously slow — “It will take 25 years to reach gender parity at the senior-VP level and more than 100 years in the C-suite.”
In an era where innovations in technology and business are moving at lightning speed, the reality is that, at the rate we are going, the change we seek will happen far after we are here. You would think given proof that more women in leadership positions improve financial performance, companies would be trying anything and everything to accelerate the movement.
The Idea
If you injected FlexTeam’s (or any similar group of women) behind the full-time female workers at companies, what would happen? Can each of these full-timers have that intangible “feel” of female support that can be a proxy to the critical mass needed before it is actually achieved?
The idea is to allocate some of the existing diversity budget and to give to each full-time women at these companies. With the budget, women can customize and leverage support from our team (or something similar) to help her do her day-to-day job better. The more support, the happier they can be, and the extra hires from the other diversity efforts will be retained until there really are enough full-time women employees who can affect the long-lasting culture change.
While we cannot be at all of her meetings to provide her in-person support, FlexTeam can help her meet her own personal expectations, including her tendency to over-prepare, over-analyze, and sell herself short. We can be her sounding board of subject matter experts. We can be mentors, coaches, or peers — whatever combination of support she believes she needs. Practical solutions (beyond telling her to lean in) that are focused on her job, her achievements, and her happiness — and measured by retention.
What’s Next?
While our FlexTeam service continues to leverage underutilized, smart, educated, mid-career women to do on-demand research and analysis projects for all business leaders, it would mean a lot to us to provide our services to help other women in accomplish more and succeed.
We would love to connect with diversity experts, visionary leaders, and/or innovative companies who want to leverage our unique assets to propel their women workers. It would be a win-win, and with the current pace as it is, there is nothing to lose to add another tool to the arsenal. Truly achieving diversity is not an easy task, but if we can do it together, it would be definitely a fruitful endeavor.
#womenbackingwomen
About FlexTeam
FlexTeam is the software+human intelligence PM layer between business leaders and the growing liquid knowledge workforce. We leverage a trusted network of executive-level women working in teams to enable our customers accomplish more. Currently, our team is comprised of MIT alumni women with average 10+ years of experience. Our teammates are generally moms who have dropped out of traditional workforce for more flexible schedules. Together, we are redefining how smart work gets done.
We support startups, investment firms (VCs/PEs), agencies, and enterprises (strategy, BD, innovation teams) with on-demand research and analysis projects. Think of us as on-demand extra brainpower.
We are @ Website | Twitter | Facebook | Email. #newplayingfield
