How Can Chasing Sirens Be Part of Our Office Jobs?
TMI Consulting, Inc. is in a downtown office building in Richmond. It’s a busy area filled with office buildings, churches, restaurants and the Virginia State Capitol. Just for clarity’s sake, we are a Certified B Corp in the business of helping organizations build cohesive, diverse, inclusive and equitable workplaces.
Late last year, on a day with only two people in the office, sirens started screaming past our building. While sirens are not a completely unusual sound in the area, our Chief of Operations Laura Bowser and Administrative Manager Skyler Broughman looked at each other and raced to the street. Around the corner they saw fire trucks and an ambulance with lights flashing outside a church with week-day child care. Their first concern was the children, including Laura’s daughter. Once they determined everyone from the child care center was all right, they were told the children would be relocated to another center two blocks away and down a flight of stairs. Moving the 15 or 20 kids — about half of them in cribs — seemed a huge task for the 2–3 adults, so our TMI duo pitched in wheeling cribs and carrying children.
“It was never a question of should we help, but how can we help.” says Skyler. “I know any other employee at TMI would react the same way.”
It turns out that a boiler had exploded outside and a painter working nearby was injured and tended by emergency responders.
Since being a B Corp means being a force for good, their work-day behavior in this situation was a no-brainer. Just as we want to be forces for good for our clients and colleagues, we also want to be a force for good for our community — and we hold ourselves accountable for our actions.
At TMI Consulting, Inc. we consider accountability to be a key factor in everything we do. We’re a socially driven enterprise, committed to providing a benefit to the world. This translates to all aspects of our business, whether it is ensuring supplier diversity, creating equitable employment standards or working with our clients to help them become more inclusive and diverse organizations.
We have built accountability into all of our offerings — and we think being honored as a 2018 Best for the World in both Overall and Governance categories is a testimony to the way we practice what we preach.
Accountability as a Value
A value is only as good as the behavior it inspires. At TMI Consulting, Inc. we practice what we consider 360-degree accountability and 180-degree accountability. What are they and how can they translate to your business?
360 Degree Accountability
You might want to think of 360-degree accountability as external accountability, which means it involves clients or customers. Our clients’ needs are varied so each project is customized. Regardless of whether a project is long or short in length, it always involves an accountability assessment with a report to the client. A short project may only include one assessment, while a long term one may have interim assessments as well as a final one.
We like to have anonymous feedback so no individual participants are singled out. We can do this by holding the assessment in a large all-hands staff meeting. As participants enter the meeting area, we give each person small clicker that might remind you of your remote control at home. Don’t be fooled. These clickers give each individual the opportunity to weigh in on specific questions about where the organization culture is now as opposed to where they want it to be and about how participation in a TMI Consulting, Inc. project is shifting the organization towards its goals. When the session concludes we are able to collect the data from all the responses and formulate them into a report. We also protect individual employee anonymity for clients who wish to dig even deeper using one of TMI’s longer, more robust online assessments. How can we do this when people usually register or logon using their emails? We do this by only disaggregating results to the team level if the team has at least 25 people and enough diversity that individuals cannot be singled out. If those two conditions are not present, we only disaggregate to the next highest level. Protecting people is one of our core responsibilities in this line of work.
We qualify and quantify organizational diversity and inclusion to help map, measure and improve workplace culture. We don’t just move the needle, we show you where it is. We can make recommendations and help implement a customized strategy. We use clear, measurable goals to move organizations from their present states to desired ones.
180-Degree Accountability
This assessment of accountability has a different focus — and one that is every bit as important as the 360-degree assessment. The 180 degree one focuses on our internal organization.
Assessments of the core team in our small business happen bi-weekly. Everyone in our group is involved. We look at team goals, successes and challenges as well as individual goals, successes and challenges. We discuss interactions with clients and each other. We discuss prospective clients and how we may be of use to them. Each of us reports on our current projects. We report on whether we made our weekly goals or ran into challenges. We get advice from colleagues, new assignments, new goals and encouragement.
At times these are formal sessions, but often they are casual, occurring in the common area where most of us work in the office. This is every bit as important as client accountability because it strengthens our team commitment and atmosphere.
TMI Consulting, Inc.’s Accountability Attributes
We focus on three attributes to be shown by each employee as well as all of us collectively. We encourage all three — presence, transparency and looking out for others. We practice these not only in the office, with our clients and each other, but at home and where ever else life takes us.
Presence
The nature of our work requires that we practice presence–within our team, with our clients, and with our community. Presence can be challenging with an open workspace, with the myriad distractions of our daily lives, and with countless competing priorities. These factors make it even more imperative that we show up in service of one another.
Sometimes being present just means putting your phone down or back in your pocket when someone is speaking with you. Sometimes it means really clearing your head when an employee from a random organization, client or prospective client, calls with an agonizing story about their workplace experience. Sometimes presence is about showing up in the community and really listening and engaging with the people around you.
Whatever the context, we practice and encourage our team to be fully present as much as possible because it’s an easy way to demonstrate respect and appreciation for people. When you allow yourself to really be in the moment and experience the gift of another person’s time and presence, you can learn so much. It’s an opportunity to get to know them, to understand them a little better, and to build or deepen a new or existing relationship. There may be no greater act of inclusion than creating and holding space for people to show up and share who they are and what they want to express.
Transparency
At TMI there aren’t many doors — the heart of our office is its open floor plan. This facilitates both transparence in communication and a strong sense of camaraderie. “We can, and do, talk about anything that we’re feeling, what we are doing well, what needs improvement,” says our Skyler. “We even venture into areas that may not necessarily apply to our job titles but would help other departments and the company as a whole.” Doors are only closed when sensitive information is being discussed.
Looking Out For Others
Helping temporarily relocate the children to another center was certainly looking out for others, but it was an unusual situation. We’re more likely to be helping colleagues pick up some slack so that they can work at home when a repair person is due to fix the heating and air conditioning unit or when a child is home sick. We as individuals look out for each other and the company. We look out for the company by taking care of all our responsibilities and collaborating with teammates to ensure work is completed. And the company looks out for us with things like paid family and medical leave and a vacation leave policy of a minimum of 30 days after a year in good standing. If 30 days PTO minimum isn’t good enough, there is no maximum. We are firm believers in work/life balance because families are important and vacation breaks make us better workers. We look for where we can help each other because we’re a team and a victory for one is a victory for all.
Dr. Tiffany Jana (they/them) is the author of four books published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers: Overcoming Bias: Building Authentic Relationships across Differences , Erasing Institutional Bias: How to Create Systemic Change for Organizational Inclusion, the IPPY Award winning second edition of The B Corp Handbook, and Subtle Acts of Exclusion: How to Understand, Identify, and Stop Microaggressions. Follow their YouTube docuseries Life With Doc Jana for a more personal journey, including a children’s inclusion storytelling series “StoryTime with Doc Jana”.
Dr. Jana is an international public speaker, and the founder of the TMI Portfolio of Companies — a collection of socially responsible and interconnected companies working to advance more culturally inclusive and equitable workforces. Now offering 100% virtual JEDI support. TMI Consulting, a portfolio company, is a Benefit Corporation as well as a certified B Corporation and earned the 2016, 2018, and 2019 Best for the World honor from the nonprofit B Lab that certifies B Corps worldwide.
They have been featured in the New York Times, Psychology Today, Fast Company, SXSW, and Forbes. Dr. Jana gave a TEDx talk in December 2012 as part of TEDxRVAWomen. They earned the 2017 Enterprising Women of the Year Award from Enterprising Women Magazine. They were named one of the 2018 Top 100 Leadership Speakers by Inc.com and are a columnist for CEO World Magazine.
