Faces in the Crowd: Todd Corley on Inclusion in the Workplace & Hiring Gen Z
This is part three of Door of Clubs Faces in the Crowd series that highlights the unique job stories of Generation Z as they enter the workforce, while also spotlighting business executives from minority backgrounds that are disrupting the hiring status quo.
Today we’re speaking with Todd Corley, Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer at OhioHealth, and Chairman of the National Society of High School Scholars Foundation. Todd is a thought leader on diversity and inclusion, as well as hiring Generation Z, and he wrote a book on how he transformed Abercrombie & Fitch to be more inclusive with its millennial workers and customers. If you missed previous Q&A’s see part one and part two.
Door of Clubs: Thanks for joining us Todd. I know your day job is as Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer at OhioHealth, but you’re also the chairman of the NSHSS Foundation, can you tell us more about that foundation?
Todd: Sure, it’s the National Society of High School Scholars. It’s been around for probably 15 years and it was founded by Mr. Nobel, who is the senior most member of the Nobel family that founded the Nobel prizes. He’s been on this quest forever, to try to create scholarship organizations for young people. The NSHSS has probably about a million and a half kids from 160 countries. Really smart kids, but also kids who are just trying to get into school, get a good education and give back to society.
We caught a Forbes piece on a recent NSHSS survey that looked at some of the trends with Generation Z entering the workplace and wanted to see if you could provide some highlights from that survey and what Gen Z is looking for from potential employers as they enter the workforce?
The overarching thing I think we found in that study, and they’ve been doing it for a number of years, is they want fairness, they want equality, they want places that feel good. Furthermore, they want places that are purpose-driven, workplaces that really promote how they’re giving back, and are connected with bigger life missions. Careers in medicine are coming up quickly as one of their desired destinations — mainly because of this.There’s also some movement in other industries. Gen Z is interested in foreign service (the CIA scores highly) and Google topped the charts.
That same study found a high percentage of respondents were really impacted by how an employer treats employees and people in general. Does Generation Z want to work for companies that are doing good?
I think the generation wants companies to know that they are part of a bigger society and not only chasing profits. They also want employers to encourage them to further their global learning. There’s a lot in this study around international travel and exposure, which is related to being connected to a bigger place than just where you live or grew up. Generation Z has aspirations for connecting to people that come from different paths and want to become more educated and aware of the world around them.
Shifting into what you’re doing on your corporate setting at OhioHealth, did the same mission-driven aspects that are attracting Generation Z to the healthcare field appeal to you?
Yeah, it’s funny. I’m clearly not a Gen Z, I’m an X’er. However, I spent a lot of my life at Abercrombie & Fitch, which was originally part of a generational movement of millennials.
I think the time there made me realize I have an affinity for generations of different people driving change. Whether I’m part of that generation or simply guiding them along the way, that has kept me working in diversity roles. My experience at A & F, and then consulting for a variety of companies, and now at OhioHealth, has always been focused on driving change that is meaningful at a higher level than the bottom line.
Of course, in the healthcare space, the margin for error is zero to none. We’re talking about life and access to quality healthcare. We’re talking about people being preventative about their well being — meaning avoid getting sick as opposed to solving it after it already happens. I think in that sense, the healthcare field is appealing to me in the same way it may be to Gen Z’ers.
What types of diversity initiatives are you working on within OhioHealth today?
Just today we were doing training around unconscious bias. Our executive team are strong advocates of understanding this and want to know how they can evolve their management styles. They want to know how to mitigate cultural biases internally and externally.
We’re thinking about healthcare disparity and access issues. This means we’re looking at communities who don’t have the same level of access to good healthcare, good service, ready-made things that might be in their communities because they live further out north or out south, or their community’s are over-depressed. This is stuff that really matters and it’s fun being able to create a strategy around inclusive corporate behavior.
Touching on that, I was reading your background and some people call you “the man that made Abercrombie & Fitch less white male”. That must have been a huge transition and I’m wondering how it happened? Also, why did they want to make that change?
Why A&F made the change, and how it happened, are certainly very different. I’ll deal with the positive first — how it happened. I believe there was a generational shift in values. When I first walked into A & F, 90% of the people were white.
That was 40,000 people, 700 stores. And under six years, we grew a lot more. We added 60,000 people. We added 300 stores, so by that time we’re at 100,000 people.
During that shift, when the percentage of racial diversity surpassed 50%, I was mapping out a strategy for getting employees more engaged, more talkative and more focused on our culture. I had the complete blessing of having a workforce of millennials.
They were already thinking about it anyway and I just had to help them through how to talk about it. How we translate that into how you hire, how you get feedback, how you connect with people, how you build relationships, how you get a customer. All in a more inclusive fashion.
What I didn’t know then and what none of us really knew, is that the millennial generation was going to be in time the most diverse generation that we had ever seen. Only to be surpassed by the generations following in its footsteps.
At the time, we also didn’t have the full use of social media to fuel the change. Twitter was still a year or two away, and Facebook had been widespread for only about a year.
Was there a forcing mechanism behind the change?
It happened because millennials really wanted something different. They wanted to have more open conversations, more open community. They wanted to have people think about themselves differently. They wanted to have people be more aware of their sexual orientation or their religious beliefs or that they were bi-racial and they weren’t black. They wanted to be called multiracial.
It was all of those things happening simultaneously. The struggle that we had was getting that company to figure that out. That it was where we were headed and we couldn’t continue to be a brand that was still largely white. Marketing had to change, language had to change, everything had to get connected to an entirely new state of mind.
You can hire people who are different but when they come into the organization, in that case, a retailer, that still looks the same those new associates are not staying. That traditional bag that you might see walking around the mall, that wasn’t the one to do it. Millennials clearly, without a doubt, helped drive this change, and I happened to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right perspective. They bought in. They knew it. They got it. They understood it. It was easy for them.
You touched on how that drive towards diversity was integrated throughout the organization — with marketing, sales and everything else. Do you feel like in order for diversity to be successful it has to be more than simply pushed by human resources?
Totally. In that role, I reported to the Chairman & CEO. In this new role, I have that same relationship, a dual report into the CEO and head of HR.
If I’m not at the table like today, or meeting with people who are in charge of security, or marketing, the efforts will be futile.
Real estate, where are you going to put the next store or the next hospital? What is the makeup of that area and will it hinder health care services to those from certain communities? Who’s your vendor? Who’s going to help build this?
Who’s going to help design? What does that team look like? Inclusion has to be integrated with everything you do. Diversity cannot only be tied to the HR division, at all, because it won’t work. It just will not work. If you’re not thinking about imagery, language, if you’re not thinking about questions on the survey, if you’re not thinking about your name, and how that will be perceived by today’s diverse generation, you’re not going to move the needle.
Diversity issues within the workplace have seemingly become a hot-button issue within the last few years. However, you’ve been an advocate for diversity within the workplace for a few decades now. Was it your own diverse background that led to your interest in making workplaces more inclusive?
I think it’s not just one answer. I really believe that if we all just figured out how to get along with the next person and have more respect for differences than we have, we would be better off. We could have better ideas. It’s connected to how I grew up. I saw certain families were struggling to make it.
That was powerful for me. I come from a family of educators. People who were always saying go to school, learning, meeting people. I might get dropped off at a camp and camp was for kids from all backgrounds. How do we play together? Well, it’s not that hard to figure it out. I’m an only child so, to me, I had to build relationships with everybody because I didn’t have any brothers or sisters who were around me. I was by myself trying to meet or greet somebody new or different. I think that’s largely how it all came together. It’s just as simple as that.
A lot of money and corporate-made buzz is being put into diversity today, but a lot of insiders on the frontlines trying to create more inclusive workplaces believe it’s not really making a dent. Do you have any tips for other companies that are looking to ramp up their diversity efforts and how to make them really fruitful versus maybe just being something to jump on a bandwagon type of thing?
I think companies have to listen to their employees. They have to listen to their customer. I think that we need to pay attention to that. People have a solemn need to be treated and respected in their way that they’re unique.
They have to be authentic, and companies have to have accountability measures in place, their leaders have to make sure that they are behaving in a way that is more curious and more transparent. I think people have to open up their circles of influence.
If I’m a leader, let’s call myself white male senior executive, I need to surround myself with people who are speaking different languages, different sexual orientations, maybe different disabilities to learn that somebody who has a disability might be able to challenge themselves and me more creatively.
That only makes things better for all of us. I think the world is getting browner, right? It just is. There’s no way of going back as much as we want to hold onto whiteness. That’s not a bad thing.
Then from a student perspective, If I was a diverse student, maybe from a small town, and feeling like, “Hey, I’m being left out. The big technology companies are going to ten schools to recruit, the Ivy’s, and they’re not coming to my school to hire me. I’m an outcast. Is there anything I can do?
I actually think those individuals are in a better position because they can say, “Hey, I’m from a small community where we have stronger values.” Assuming that this person that we’re talking about can say, “I’m looking for a world that’s a much bigger pond.” Share some of those traditional values, like “respect and dignity of each person”, “trusting relationships”. Seeing differences in with that filter helps me to think differently.
I think that they can offer that. I think employers would love that. I think you have to be mindful that differences in diversity isn’t just about race and ethnicity. It’s about lifestyles, work habits. It’s about growing up on the farm and having to be up at 4:00 a.m. in the morning. I don’t even have a perspective on what that would look like. The only thing I see at 4:00 a.m. are my eyelids.
I think people who have small town community feel, they need to maybe do a little bit more work to get that company to see them. You can introduce yourself to them. Connect with them on social media platforms. You can highlight your differences that I think will come through. I really believe that. Those values are a common denominator for our country.
That’s interesting so almost they have to be authentic to who they are themselves, as well.
Yeah, don’t hide that! I was in a meeting today with some folks from security services. A handful were executives. One guy, had a cowboy hat on, and if you were judging the book by the cover you might not have caught his points. However, his ability to articulate what his point of view was was phenomenal.
Everybody turned his way, looking like, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t expect it to come out of him.” He was the one that hit it out of the park.
Point is, once you can show that, and display that, he was truly himself. He didn’t care what he looked like, who he was and that’s why I wanted to note his descriptive attire. I probably didn’t expect that of him and may have had my own bias going in.
Finally are you seeing any big changes in the HR and recruiting spaces? Just curious if you had to look out two or three years in terms of making more inclusive workplaces? Are you seeing any interesting trends?
I am seeing people starting to really ask, how do we best interview? Also, hearing more of this notion of having third party people as part of a performance appraisal process. So you have the interviewee, the interviewer and someone else in that room to simply take in the process.
They can be an extra lens or an ear for unconscious bias or language that turns somebody off or come out in a way that wasn’t intended.
