One of the key lessons from 2022 is that implementing effective strategies for DE&I is always a long-term journey rather than a quick fix. Sharing insights to learn from the experiences of others is a critical part of the process; progress cannot happen in a vacuum.
My guest this week is Eric Thomas, Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer at Genesys. Genesys is on a journey to become a more diverse company, and a vital part of this is increased workforce representation to align with the markets they serve. Eric has some valuable insights to share on the lessons they are learning, particularly around talent acquisition and employee experience.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Eric’s journey to becoming a Chief Diversity Officer
• The lessons Genesys has learnt during its ongoing evolution to being a more diverse company.
• Empathy and helping employees understand the why
• Inclusion and belonging
• The innovation required for effective DE&I work
• Determining priorities and experimentation
• Reimagining talent acquisition
• Redesigning the interview process
• Employee experience as a differentiator
• Advice to other employers on a similar journey
• Setting industry benchmarks and building an ecosystem.
Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:17]:
Hi there, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 488 of the Recruiting Future podcast. One of the key lessons from 2022 is that implementing effective strategies for DE and I is always a long term journey rather than a quick fix. Sharing insights to learn from the experiences of others is a critical part of the process. Progress cannot happen in a vacuum. My guest this week is Eric Thomas, Chief diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer at Genesis. Genesis is on a journey to become a more diverse company and a vital part of this is increased workforce representation to align with the markets they serve. Eric has some valuable insights to share on the lessons that they’re learning, particularly around talent acquisition and employee experience. Hi Eric and welcome to the podcast.
Eric Thomas [00:01:20]:
Hi Matt, how are you?
Matt Alder [00:01:21]:
I’m very good, thank you and it is an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you just introd yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Eric Thomas [00:01:30]:
Sure, sure. Well, first of all, thank you for having me on the show. So Eric Thomas, and I have the privilege of serving as Genesis first Chief Diversity Officer. Genesis is a global leader in the customer experience space, serving a number of customers with our contact center platform around the globe in 30 some different countries. And we two and a half years ago set out on this path of elevating the work of diversity, equity and inclusion. And I was tapped on the shoulder and again have the privilege of helping us launch those efforts across the company.
Matt Alder [00:02:12]:
Fantastic. And really keen to dig into those in a second and find out more about what you’ve done and the lessons that you’ve learned.
Matt Alder [00:02:19]:
Before we do though, just tell us.
Matt Alder [00:02:21]:
A little bit more about your backstory and how you got to do what you do now.
Eric Thomas [00:02:24]:
Oh, great. So you know, I am not a seasoned DEI practitioner. I have always been a champion of the work, you know, in the various leadership roles I’ve served in. I’ve always either sponsored employee resource groups or supported, you know, the company’s efforts of recruiting diverse talent and bringing diverse talent to the company, but never led the way. I have the opportunity to lead today as the actual DEI practitioner and leader. I spent the first 25 years of my career leading business lines, leading digital transformations, mostly customer facing in the IT and consulting, professional services space. And you know, two years ago or two and a half years ago, as I mentioned before, you know, as when we all were, you know, sitting at home managing and working around the pandemic, I think we all were sequestered and was able to see the video that surfaced that aired the murder and the lynching of George Floyd. It was an incident that happened local to the US but obviously quickly became a global phenomenon. And it put a lot of companies into a mode of being more intentionally focused around the work. It was a catalyst for a number of companies to step up and say, we need to do more. And Genesis was in the same category. And at the time, I, I was working with our Genesis leadership, with our CEO and our chief communications officer with some efforts that they were facilitating across the company. We, you know, like a lot of companies, we made some public statements about how we felt about what we were seeing in the aftermath, basically taking a position of solidarity with the black community and announcing wrong is wrong and, you know, taking positions against hate and systemic racism. We had a number of internal conversations with our employees around the topic of race relations and what it looks like to empathize for each other and how we show up for each other in an empathetic way. And so I was part of helping to organize those activities. And one of the other actions that we took was to launch a diversity office and hire a chief diversity officer. And it was through those conversations with our CEO and some of our other leaders that I was asked to take on that responsibility. And that’s how I came into this role.
Matt Alder [00:04:57]:
And tell us about the journey over the last two years to become a more diverse company and perhaps some of the lessons that you’ve learned so far.
Eric Thomas [00:05:06]:
Along the way in my conversations with Tony Bates, our CEO, and it was during a period in which we were talking about the possibility of me leading this role. You know, he had joined the company in 2019, so he was about a little over a year and a half at his post. And, you know, he came on to help drive our corporate transformation, our business transformation, from being a prim based to a cloud SaaS based solution. And he had a number of initiatives, as you might imagine, that he was putting in play as being, you know, the new CEO. And he, you know, he shared with me at that point that he, you know, it was always his intention to have diversity as part of our corporate initiatives. You know, empathy is one of the cornerstones of our corporate values. And it was something that Tony brought as part of his leadership style. But as I mentioned before, you know, the George Floyd murder was kind of the catalyst for elevating this work for him. And it launched our journey. And one of the first things we did was to set out to build A solid foundation for a long term and sustainable set of DEI practices, something that would outlive me or even Tony. And we first started our focus on inclusion and belonging and in educating our workforce on the why. This truly has been and continues to be a transformational change. And one of the things I’ve learned throughout my career is that anytime you’re driving change of this nature, having a clear communications plan and making sure that your workforce understands the why and more importantly, the role they play in instituting some of that change, is a key part of the change management strategy. So that’s what we focused on in year one. Then as we rounded the corner of year two, we expanded our focus to start getting our head around our data and understanding different data insights like representation of women around the globe and people of color in the U.S. understanding employee sentiment, how they feel about topics such as fairness and equity, their ability to have a fair chance at growing their career and expanding their, their, you know, their capabilities at Genesis, as well as retention, you know, or do we have challenges with retention when you look at it across various demographics. And the data provided key insights into helping us understand the challenges that we had, particularly if we were having challenges with how we administer certain policies and practices that have a direct impact on employee experience, but also in helping us develop our strategic framework or DEI framework, and set some of our earlier priorities in terms of what to focus on in the beginning and in leveraging the knowledge gained from the data, we were able to set goals, diversity goals, representation goals for aligning the diversity of our workforce with the markets we serve, which would mean we would need to increase the representation of women across our workforce and among the leadership ranks over the next four or five years, as well as increasing representation of people of color in the US Then some of the lessons learned. One of the key lessons I learned from leading these efforts is just how innovative the work is, how innovative DEI work is. There truly is no one size that fits all approach that folk can take. Every company has to determine how to define diversity, equity and inclusion within the context of their environment and determine what’s important to them and what are their priorities. I think you have to give yourself room to experiment with different ideas and different initiatives to really discover what your workforce will embrace and where you think, what efforts will help drive a high amount of employee engagement, which is really important in order to really move the needle on the type of change that you’re looking to foster. And quite frankly, we’re still figuring some of this out. We’ve made some Good strides in a number of areas and we’ve seen the response rates for employees. And as a result, we pivoted at times with different things. We started down a certain path and found exit ramps because we realized it wasn’t working for us. And we’ve pivoted to things that we’re now starting to see will help us really drive, you know, create sustainable practices. So that’s one of the key lessons learned.
Matt Alder [00:09:39]:
You mentioned there that one of the objectives was to increase the representation within the business. What’s the impact been on your talent acquisition strategy?
Eric Thomas [00:09:49]:
Yeah, you know, so we, we have to really. We had to completely reimagine how we do talent acquisition. Right. One of the key things we did was expand our list of sourcing partners to include organizations and institutions who focus on producing high amounts or high rates of diverse talent. And that of course helped increase our abilities to source diverse talent and present diverse slates of candidates to our hiring managers. We also piloted and are now looking to deploy at scale a competency based interviewing model for our recruiters and our hiring managers to minimize the number of subjective questions posed during the interview, which can create space for biases to creep in and to focus on a set of questions allowing us to really improperly assess candidates skills and capabilities against the competencies needed for the role. And then the other thing we did is we launched anti bias training for all of our recruiters and all of our hiring managers and we made it mandatory before engaging in any part of the recruiting process. These changes, some of the short changes or quick changes that we’ve made to our talent acquisition approach and procedures and it’s quite frankly, I believe it has been the difference maker in helping us realize some of the progress that we’ve seen in an increased amount of representation of both women around the globe and various underrepresented groups in the US I.
Matt Alder [00:11:22]:
Suppose just to dive in a second into the way that you changed your assessment and what you assess for and the interview questions.
Matt Alder [00:11:29]:
I mean that sounds like that would.
Matt Alder [00:11:31]:
Have been quite an in depth process. How did you go about doing that?
Eric Thomas [00:11:35]:
We transitioned from a less subjective approach of how both recruiters and hiring managers interview candidates to a more mechanical approach with a scripted set of questions and that you would be limited to asking a candidate that would be geared towards enabling you to assess is this individual in terms of their resume, their capabilities and skills and how they are articulating their ability to deliver on certain things based on that assessment, are they a fit for the competencies and the role and the skills required in the role, and it removes room for hiring managers asking women, as an example, do you plan to have children in the future? Do you have an issue with traveling? Or some of the other things that questions that we discovered were really being asked through some of these interviewing processes that unfortunately, was putting certain demographics at a disadvantage, but really had nothing to do with whether or not they could do the role or not. And so the goal was to mitigate those types of scenarios surfacing during the process.
Matt Alder [00:12:53]:
Absolutely. You mentioned sort of employee engagement and the employee experience. How do you differentiate yourself as an employer?
Eric Thomas [00:13:03]:
Genesis really leans in the concept of empathy. It is a cornerstone our corporate values, and it was a gateway to evolving. What does empathy look like in terms of through a DEI lens? How do we show up and create and foster an inclusive environment? How do we develop leaders that know how to lead inclusively? With that being at the cornerstone of our corporate values? It’s woven into the fabric of how we do things. If you take, for example, our employee engagement and the Pulse surveys that we distribute to get a sense of employee sentiment, it’s a key way of listening to your employees. But more importantly, when you get the data back, are you acting? And I think that’s one of the things that really differentiates Genesis. You can pick up the paper or any type of article and talk about how different companies are addressing the return to work approach. And, you know, our employees, you know, we did a survey and we kind of, you know, took it, obtained an understanding from our employees of how they felt about coming back to the office post pandemic. And it was pretty clear. I think it was over 60% wanted the opportunity to continue working virtually. So we created, you know, a strategy, our return to work strategy, or, you know, we workplace of the future around that. We have hybrid scenarios where if you’re within a certain distance of the office, you can choose to drive in, or you can only come in certain days of the week if you want to be in the office every day because you really desire that type of communal approach and interaction, it’s available to you, or if you want to be completely virtual, it’s available to you. And we make sure that we outfit or equip our employees with the tools to where they can be just as productive, either virtually or in a hybrid fashion in the office, because we saw those capabilities surface during the pandemic. And it’s just one of the many ways I think that, you know, Genesis differentiates itself in terms of how it deals with its employees.
Matt Alder [00:15:12]:
There are A lot of companies who are on a journey to become more diverse organizations. What advice would you give to other employers based on your experience so far?
Eric Thomas [00:15:24]:
Yeah, so, you know, I think there’s three things that come top of mind. First of all, if you are looking to launch your DEI efforts like we did from, you know, from concept, or even if you’re looking to expand on some of the work you’ve been doing, I think it’s critically important for companies to take the time to really understand and define what diversity, equity and inclusion means within your workplace, within the context of your environment, what’s important to your workforce, Listen to your employees. Because what I’ve learned and what we’ve learned is that our employees will tell us what challenges are or what diversity efforts are important to them. Diversity can take on such a broad spectrum and if you try to boil the ocean out of the gate, you know, it’s like anything else. You can do three things. One to one, two to three things very great or you do ten things very mediocre. And I think our employees, your employees will tell you what are the things that are top of mind and important for them. The other piece of advice I would give folk, and I kind of referenced this earlier, is give yourself room to experiment with different ideas and initiatives to discover what actually works within your environment and what your workforce will embrace. It’s okay to start out certain efforts and, and realize that because the work is very innovative, that maybe this doesn’t work for you, maybe it doesn’t fit for you. And give yourself room to find exit ramps and to start again. And then I think the last thing I would say, probably I should move it to number one, is make data and analytics your best friends. People can argue the marriage of DEI all day long. Is there truly an roi? You hear that conversation all the time or do we really have issues at our company? Do we really even need this work? And the data doesn’t lie. It’s like a suitcase ready business justification. And I think those are probably the three key things I would share with anyone looking to either launch or expand their DEI efforts.
Matt Alder [00:17:32]:
And as a final question, how do you hope DE and I will develop over the next two to three years?
Eric Thomas [00:17:39]:
You know, Matt, one of the things I’ve come to appreciate about this, about the work, the DEI work, one of the things that is different from the work I’ve done in the past, it’s just how communal the space is. Through the network of other DEI leaders that I engage with, we share, openly share our experiences with Each other our best practices, if I can use that term. We share anything that we’ve discovered that works. Hey, give it a shot. See if this works for you. See if this helps you move the needle on various initiatives that you’re driving within your company. Because we all want to see each other be successful, right in this space. There’s really, you don’t really have that competitive nature that you see on the commercial and business front. And I think it’s past time for some type of industry standards to be produced to help us align on what good looks like. Right now we all pretty much benchmark ourselves against our own work and we set out on course, we’ll set goals and, and if we’re retaining those goals, then we can say, oh, okay, we’re making good progress. But at the end of the day, without a very strong industry ecosystem, I don’t know how much progress all of us can really make in terms of it being really truly material. If you think about the telecom space, there are standards on how and protocols on how technology evolves. And that’s how you go from 3G to 4G to 5G. If you look in the software development space, things like open sourcing and those types of things has helped us come up with new applications and ways for the technology to evolve. I think it’s way past time for us to develop a set of industry standards around diversity, equity and inclusion. So we’re not just don’t have ourselves a benchmark against each other, we’re benchmarking against how good has been defined for the industry. One other thought I will share about the future, I think collectively DEI leaders and maybe it is somewhat aligned with defining industry standards. I think we need to start preparing ourselves to address an increasing amount of organized opposition in the U.S. we have in the next week or so we may have a shift in the judiciary and that shift has a direct impact on how companies in some cases policy impact on how this work can or cannot be done. And I don’t think that collectively we’re prepared to address some of those challenges head on that allows us to continue to move needle in this space. I think that’s what we need to be thinking about in terms of the future of dei.
Matt Alder [00:20:25]:
Eric, thank you very much for talking to me.
Eric Thomas [00:20:28]:
I enjoyed it. Thank you Matt. I appreciate you having me.
Matt Alder [00:20:31]:
My thanks to Eric. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the monthly newsletter Recruiting Future Feast and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
