Posts belonging to Category diversity

All’s fair in love and recruitment.

Robert Mellwig, SVP, Really Cool People, Destination Hotels & Resorts/Lowe Enterprises, offered no apologies for his company’s “shameless” search function, external referral program and other outreach efforts.

Mellwig was part of a panel that offered a variety of tips to HR professionals at the HR in Hospitality® Conference & Expo in Las Vegas.  Other panel members included Dina Barmasse-Gray, SVP, HR, Cheesecake Factory; Rebecca Henry, VP, People Services, Allegiant Travel Co., and Diane Turek-Pire, SVP, HR, Wyndham Hotel Group. Bruce Tracey, associate professor, school of hotel administration, Cornell University, moderated the panel.

Members had plenty to say about how their HR function operated. Henry explained that HR contacts its alumni group (former employees) several times a year for referrals, connects its HR system with its ticketing system to drive efficiency and spends 80 percent of its efforts on the top 20 percent of the company’s highest performers. Barmasse-Gray discussed the company’s video café, featuring employee videos addressing work tips, and how diversity is never taken for granted but is no longer a “top strategic imperative”. Turek-Pire mentioned a move from individual toward constellation or team awards and that HR was shifting its focus from employee engagement to trust, which builds loyalty.

Surprisingly, no one seemed concerned over Obamacare. Henry said the biggest needle-mover was getting spouses or adult children involved in healthcare. “People have the highest level of dissatisfaction when they don’t understand how it works,” she said.

Mellwig appeared to be the rebel of the group. He said HR awards employees for their contributions, not tenure, and ignores routine raises. “We believe in wild (salary) swings that are performance-driven.  It creates controversy but we get better results.”

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It’s been roughly three years since we reported that East Hanover, N.J.-based Novartis Pharmaceutical Corp., the U.S. arm of the Swiss drug maker, had been fined $250 million in punitive damages. It ultimately agreed to pay $152 million.

We mentioned at the time that the jury verdict served as a reminder of the very steep price companies can pay if they’re on the losing end of one of these class-actions.

Of course, that was prior to the Supreme Court’s Wal-Mart Stores Inc. v. Dukes decision, which made it a lot more difficult to certify class actions.

Well, the attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the Novartis case, Sanford Heisler LLP, are back, this time announcing a class-action case against Tokyo-based Daiichi Sankyo, in which six current and former female representatives are alleging discrimination.

In the complaint, the plantiffs’ attorneys allege that …

Daiichi Sankyo pays female sales employees less than male employees for doing the same work; promotes or advances female sales employees at a slower rate than male sales employees; treats pregnant employees and working mothers of young children adversely compared to non-pregnant employees, male employees, or non-caregivers; and subjects women to other discriminatory terms and conditions of employment.

And that …

 … a discrete group of predominantly male Daiichi executives and senior sales managers keep a tight rein on employment decisions, including decisions regarding sales employees’ compensation, advancement, and other terms and conditions of employment. Through this male-dominated leadership structure, the company has approved and implemented policies, practices and decisions that have systemically discriminated against female employees.

Several reporters were told by the company via email that it does not comment on pending litigation and “complies with all laws regarding equal opportunity and non-discrimination.”

I spoke to Tom Lewis, shareholder and chair of the Employment Litigation Group at Stark & Stark in Lawrenceville, N.J., to get his thoughts on the action.

Lewis predicts that the plaintiff’s attorneys will likely put “front and center” the fact that the firm is Japanese … that “a Japanese company wouldn’t treat its female employees as well as an American company would.”

“But let’s remember,” he adds, “that a class-action lawsuit like this has to be proven”—and that may not be easy.

Lewis notes that he’s represented many foreign-owned companies and his experience is that they “often go above and beyond the call of duty to make sure that, culturally, they’re complying with the laws of this country.”

He also suggests it makes perfect sense that the plantiff’s attorneys would select San Francisco to file the suit in, since the employment laws in California are much more employee-friendly.

We’ll have to watch and see how this case eventually plays out. But this much is certain: The plaintiffs in this case will have a tougher hill to climb in gaining class-action status.

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It appears agreeing on a proposal to require company boards in the European Union to be made up of at least 40 percent women is a bit dicier than some thought.

At least that’s what’s implied by Viviane Reding’s comments in this New York Times report about the European Commission postponing its decision on the proposal due to tough opposition and concerns over its legality. The proposal was initially scheduled for a ruling Oct. 23 and will now come up for discussion again on Nov. 14. (Here’s an earlier Times story that provides more background on the proposal.)

As Reding, the European commissioner for justice, said in the Oct. 23 piece, the figure being considered ”is still 40 percent. But the way to arrive there has been looked at in a different way.”

The debate ”was very intense,” she said, explaining that the discussion on the legality of any quota was one reason the meeting that day in Strasbourg, France took the several hours that it did. No doubt other reasons included Reding’s proposed penalities and sanctions that companies and organizations would face if they failed to improve their boards’ female representation.

According to the story, the issue has divided the European Union, with Britain leading the countries that regard the proposed rule as counterproductive and unworkable. Other countries taking that view include The Netherlands, Malta, the Czech Republic, Latvia and Bulgaria.

I went searching for the latest rundown on where all countries — including the United States — stand on female representation on boards of directors. Not a whole lot out there, but I did find this paper (free download included) by University of Pittsburgh School of Law professor Douglas M. Branson, An Australian Perspective on a Global Phenomenon: Initiatives to Place Women on Corporate Boards of Directors. According to his report on research he did:

The statistics indicating the representation of women on corporate boards vary widely from country to country. Norway, which passed its controversial quota law in 2003, in effect mandates that 40 percent of a public company’s directors be women by 2008, a goal which has been achieved.

According to Catalyst Inc. [a New York-based organization promoting inclusive workplaces], in the United States, the proportion of women on boards of large, publicly held companies stands at 16.1 percent, but with the proportion stagnant from 2004 onward. Portugal has the fewest females on corporate boards of publicly held corporations, accounting for just 6 percent.

Overall, the 2010 European average was 11.7 percent but, again, the numbers varied widely. After Norway, the highest five were: Sweden (28.2 percent), Finland (26 percent), Netherlands (20.9 percent), Denmark (14 percent), and the United Kingdom (11.5 percent). Besides Portugal, the laggards included Italy (3.6 percent), Luxembourg (6 percent) and Germany (7 percent).

Two years [2010 to 2012] have seen significant change, to between 13 percent and 14 percent. France, which adopted a quota law early in 2011, is thought to be responsible for half or more of the EU increase, with the percentage of women directors increasing from 12 percent to 24 percent in 14 months.

On the Pacific Rim, Australia leads among the countries from which statistics are available, with 13.8 percent. New Zealand follows with approximately 10 percent. Others in the queue include Hong Kong (8.9 percent) and Peoples Republic of China (7.2 percent). The caboose is Japan (1.4 percent).

Not sure where I stand on all this. Not sure quotas ever really improve the overall makeups of organizations or countries. My guess, though – having not been invited to that fiery Oct. 23 meeting – is that the lower-scoring entities “may protest [the most], methinks,” to (sort of) quote Shakespeare.

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A new report from Vanguard shows that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to take loans and hardship withdrawals from their 401(k)s than whites and Asians — but all of those groups borrow roughly the same amount. 

The report — Diversity and Defined Contribution Plans: Loans and hardship Withdrawals — states “there was no meaningful difference in 12-month loan default rates among groups. This higher incidence of loans among blacks and Hispanics occurs after controlling for income, account balance, and other demographic differences.”

The implications of such activity, according to Vanguard, is:

Loans and hardship withdrawals offer participants pre-retirement liquidity from DC plan savings, and are thought to increase plan participation and contribution rates. Our findings suggest that blacks and Hispanics disproportionately make use of these features, although the fraction of account wealth “at risk” among individual black and Hispanic participants is not meaningfully higher.

These findings may also reflect other unobservable characteristics, such as differences in financial literacy, trust in financial institutions, or constrained access to credit outside the plan.

For sponsors concerned about participants borrowing from retirement savings, one plan design strategy is to consider limiting participants to one loan outstanding and/or other modest borrowing restrictions. This strategy appears to reduce borrowing levels across all participants and all racial and ethnic groups.

Personally, while I understand employers are concerned about workers saving enough for retirement — and it certainly is a totally valid concern – I think it oversteps the boundaries for any employer to limit the availability of an individual’s own money when he or she may be in dire straits pre-retirement.

And if the worker is raiding their retirement savings to foolishly waste his or money now, that’s the individual’s choice. It’s a choice with consequences — and employers should attempt to increase financial literacy efforts — but I don’t believe most workers will be willing to cede control over their own funds.

And I wonder what the impact would be on participation in defined-contribution plans should that occur. That’s another choice with potential consequences.

The study looked at 2010 data for nearly 250,000 participants in seven large defined-contribution plans.

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This isn’t the first time I’ve come across information about the need for more Asian-Americans in top leadership posts in corporate America. But these numbers I found surprising enough to share.

In two separate reports, Los Angeles-based Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics Inc. has unveiled pretty telling evidence that, no matter how well-trained and well-educated they are, Asian-Americans are still woefully missing from America’s boardrooms.

In this study, LEAP finds 116 Asian and Pacific Islanders held 135 board seats at Fortune 500 companies in 2011, representing 2.4 percent of the total number of board seats at those companies. Worse still, a staggering 77.8 percent of those companies have no API representation on their boards.

In another study, the organization finds 75 APIs holding 78 board seats at the top 100 nonprofits in this country last year, representing 2.55 percent of the total 3,061 board seats in those nonprofits.

Contrast that with the fact that these API Americans constituted 6 percent of the U.S. total population in 2010, according to a report by the Selig Center for Economic Growth that incorporated U.S. Census figures, and its buying power was expected to grow 42 percent from $544 billion in 2010 to $775 billion in 2015.

Somethin ain’t right. This definition of bamboo ceiling from Wikipedia reveals another nuance of what certainly looks and feels like bias to me:

Bamboo ceiling – The exclusion of Asian-descendants from executive and managerial roles on the basis of subjective factors such as “lack of leadership potential” or “inferior communication ability” whereas the East Asian-descendants candidate has superior objective credentials such as education in high-prestige universities (in comparison to their white counterparts with only lower-prestige university credentials).For example, research shows that there are a decent number of partners at leading prestigious law firms in the United States who did not attend top notch law schools. However, an East Asian American partner of a leading law firm who did not attend a “Top 16 Law School” (according to the U.S. News ranking) would be seldom found.

LEAP CEO Linda Akutagawa took a good part of an hour today to talk with me about the problems of perception and cultural differences that both Asian and western employers and employees need to work on. In other words, just because Asian values include speaking only when you have something important to say, and showing respect for colleagues and – most especially – your boss by keeping quiet when they’re speaking doesn’t mean Asian-Americans don’t have leadership skills.

“Companies, and their HR executives, should really be looking at what leadership really is in their companies,” she says. “Does it mean aggressive, networker, fast on your feet, good communicator? Or does it allow for someone who does not exhibit those behaviors?”

And Asian-American workers, she says, need to better understand how their values and cultural behaviors are impacting their career-development paths. That’s something her group can help with, along with helping HR leaders design and execute better Asian and western outreach and education efforts.

“There are so many things HR executives can do to better these numbers,” Akutagawa says. And they should, when you consider the skills and talents companies are missing out on in top-leadership and board positions. ”A lot of corporations have nonprofit partnerships; HR executives could be getting more active and vocal about trying to place talented and interested Asian-Americans on their boards so they can be getting that kind of corporate-leadership experience.”

The most important focus for HR leaders, though, should be on building up their talent pipelines to include more Asian-Americans, she says. “My hope is for HR to think long-term about this,” she adds, so API top talent is able to move beyond mid-management — where most of these employees’ career ladders end — so they’re better represented in the top-management succession chain and top-of-mind instead of disregarded when board positions open up.

The good news, small though it may be, is that the Fortune 500 board-representation numbers from 2011 are at least better than 2010, when 96 APIs held 115 board seats, representing only 2.1 percent of the total 5,520 board seats at those companies. Long way to go though.

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Panelists at the 3rd Annual Cornell University Executive Summit took up the issues of “changing demographics” and “social media and HR” — the two topics selected from a list of 12 by attendees at the HR in Hospitality™ Conference for a wide-ranging discussion.

There were lots of opinions by the group of 11 HR leaders and attorneys on the panel about the use of social media for recruiting, engagement, training, screening, to reconnect with alumni, you name it.

There was little controversy about its use for recruiting; using it for screening candidates was another story.

A.J. Kamra, corporate director of HR at Dow Hotel Co., said he questioned the judgment of candidates who posted inappropriate information that was visible to him – and he wouldn’t want to hire them.

Some others, including Alan Momeyer, VP of HR at Loews Corp., said they had better things to do than “trolling the Internet” looking for such information. “What is extremely offensive about someone in their 20s having a drink?” he asked.

Even when you’re not looking for information, however, you can sometimes find it — such as discovering from a Facebook status that a supervisor is dating a subordinate — but many of the panelists said HR professionals should forget about the medium. Just treat the matter the same as if they had learned the information otherwise, they said.

“Technology is just the means that exposes and creates that conversation. … It could easily happen over email or any other form,” said Robert Mellwig, senior vice president of human resources at Destination Hotels & Resorts.

As for social media policies, two attorney panelists — Paul Wagner, a shareholder at Shea Stokes Roberts & Wagner, and Gregg Gilman, a partner at Davis & Gilbert – disagreed on whether such policies should include any reference to the right of employees to criticize the company via the Internet, per recent National Labor Relations Board rulings.

Wagner thought HR should include a provision that requires such criticism to be “done respectfully.” Gilman disagreed, saying “respectfully” was too “ambiguous” a term, and that “at the end of the day … [the issue will devolve to] ‘did the employee go over the line?’ ”

Patricia Smith, senior VP of organizational design and HR at The Leading Hotels of the World, said HR should not take an “unempowered approach,” which results in being reactive instead of proactive in regard to social media.

“It’s here. It’s going to happen. It’s happening. Why not take an empowered approach?” she said.

Greg Smith, executive vice president of HR at Denihan Hospitality Group, agreed: “If you don’t embrace it, you risk losing your competitive edge.”

When talking about the changing demographics of the workforce, the discussion focused on the diverse needs of all ages, from Gen Yers beginning their work careers and those pre-retirement workers who can’t afford to retire, to mid-career employees who don’t want to uproot their families and relocate to continue their career progressions.

Mellwig said his organization has explored a “teacher pay model,” in one area that needs seasonal managers, so they are paid for nine months of work instead of 12 months. The flexibility suits the managers as well as the organization, he said.

Debbie Brown, VP of HR for the Americas at Four Seasons, said there are 11 moves generally required before an individual is made a general manager, but her organization has been looking at a “compressed career path,” which would require only four, providing for some of the progressions to take place without a relocation.

Several of the HR leaders spoke about the need to customize jobs, as well as the need to forget generational stereotypes — and focus on the individual and his or her career aspirations and abilities.

“We sometimes typecast our team members” said Momeyer, “… and we don’t look at them as individual talents … .”

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Not the greatest news for women leadership in business, if you go by recent reports from Catalyst, the New York-based organization dedicated to expanding women’s opportunities in the global marketplace.

According to the 2011 Catalyst Census: Fortune 500 Women Board Directors, Executive Officers and Top Earners and prior Catalyst censuses, women in corporate America have made no significant gains in the last year and are not further along the corporate ladder than they were six years ago. Youch.

Here are some of the more discouraging statistics, based on responses from 497 U.S.-based companies: Women held 16.1 percent of board seats in 2011, compared to 15.7 percent in 2010. (If we were rounding these, which we usually do, they’d be the same.) In both 2010 and 2011, less than one-fifth of companies had 25 percent or more women directors, while about one-tenth had no women serving on their boards.

There’s more. In both years, women of color still held only 3 percent of corporate board seats. And the number of women holding executive-officer positions actually went down, from 14.4 percent in 2010 to 14.1 percent in 2011.

The salary picture is no brighter for these women executive officers, either: In 2010, women held only 7.6 percent of executive-officer top-earner positions, a percentage that actually went down a tenth of a point in 2011, to 7.5 percent. That leaves men accounting for 92.5 percent of top earners in the year we’re about to usher out the door. Lastly, in both years, nearly one-fifth had 25 percent or more women executive officers, yet more than one-fourth had no women executive officers at all.

How can this be? Hard to say. Ilene H. Lang, president and CEO of Catalyst, says that — considering another Catalyst study demonstrates sustained gender diversity in the boardroom correlates with better corporate performance — “continued obstacles to progress make no sense.”

I know in my 11 years here, we’ve written many stories suggesting top-talent, high-performing women are rethinking the corporate-ladder top-leadership track because of its detriment to their very delicate work/life balance. But I would have thought corporate America would be further along than this by now in helping women solve those challenges — through greater flexibility, leadership development, telecommuting and teleworking options, coaching and mentoring, you name it … just sayin.

At least, on a positive note, a more expanded look by OnlineSchools.com shows more advancement. According to this recently launched “Women at Work” infographic by the Foster City, Calif.-based digital resource for online education, some 78 million women are projected to enter the workforce by 2018, with 10 percent of women over 25 holding an education beyond a bachelor’s degree in 2009, compared to only 1.7 percent in 1960.

OK, well, there’s that. I just hope those 78 million are being supported better by then.

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Intriguing research out of Rice and Pennsylvania State universities: It appears transsexuals who self-identify are more likely to be happier in, and more committed to, their jobs.

The study, “Trans-parency in the Workplace: How the Experiences of Transsexual Employees Can Be Improved,” is one of the first forms of empirical research – if not the first — on transsexuals’ experiences at work, says Michelle Hebl, the study’s co-author and a professor of psychology at Rice.

“Our research sheds light on this severely understudied population’s common workplace experiences and how such experiences can be improved,” she says.

For the study, 88 transsexual employees in the United States were surveyed about their workplace experiences to determine what factors impact their job satisfaction and organizational commitment. The more open they were about their gender identity, it found, the happier and more productive they were.

The study, which will appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Vocational Behavior, also found transsexuals who were more open with their family and friends about their lifestyle and who identified strongly as transsexuals were more likely to disclose their gender identity in the workplace than those who were less open and strongly identified.

“It’s important for individuals to have a consistent identity in the workplace and at home,” says Larry Martinez, a co-author of the study and Rice graduate student. “Having a strong support system at home can give transsexual employees the courage to disclose to their colleagues in the workplace.”

The finding of greater satisfaction at, and commitment to, work does come with one caveat: If work environments arent supportive and if co-workers or supervisors react negatively to their news, those engagement factors decline.

“Often, what’s good for the worker is good for the workplace — in this case, an open and accepting culture is really a win-win situation for all involved,” says Enrica Ruggs, also a co-author and Rice graduate student.

“The employees feel accepted, are more productive and have better experiences with co-workers,” she says. “This creates a positive working environment that may lead to decreased turnover and greater profits.”

The research, Ruggs adds, could be generalized to other groups of people who face workplace discrimination and struggle trying to decide whether to disclose their concealable stigmas, such as sexual orientation, chronic illness or a learning disability.

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Workplace diversity may not be a high priority for many employers in the United Arab Emirates. But apparently that hasn’t stopped one employer from coming up with an innovative way to tap women for one of its operations.

In cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi, a story posted yesterday on the New York Times website said, it’s difficult to find local women working, mostly because it’s considered inappropriate “for women to mingle with men who are not related.” But in response, the story said, Etihad Airways (UAE’s national airline) earlier this year found a way around that barrier, opening an all-female customer call center about two hours away from Abu Dhabi International Airport in the city of Al Ain.

“They’re more comfortable, and their families are more comfortable,” Samia Barj, manager of the center said, after showing a visitor around the building one recent morning. “Their husbands, their fathers, their families, they are all happy with that.”

In the Emirates, the story continued, more women than men attend college. “But once they have their diplomas, few occupations outside of teaching are considered acceptable.”

So can we now expect other employers in the UAE—or in other nations where similar barriers to building a “co-ed” workforce exist—to follow in Etihad Airways’ footsteps? Your guess is as good as mine. But whether that occurs or not, you have to credit the airline for finding a somewhat creative way around a well-entrenched cultural barrier that stands in the way of full employment.

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As businesses in Japan brace for an inevitable labor shortage, employers there might look to a major segment of the Japanese population for at least part of the answer—highly qualified Japanese women who voluntarily “off-ramped” from their careers for a couple of years but now want to work again.

Today, the Center for Work-Life Policy officially released a report entitled Off-Ramps and On-Ramps Japan: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success during an event held at Goldman Sachs’Tokyo offices.

In it, the authors revealed that three out of every four (74 percent) highly qualified Japanese women who work voluntarily leave their jobs. In comparison, that number is 41 percent in the U.S. and 35 percent in Germany. That’s pretty huge difference!

But the findings also dispelled the commonly held view that these women who left their jobs do so for the long haul. Instead, the study found, their desired break from work is pretty short, just 2.4 years, and that about 77 percent of those who left actually want to return to the workforce. Sadly, because of a range of re-entry barriers, only 43 percent succeed (with many who do accepting lower paying jobs).

The story line here is that there’s “a tremendous waste of talent,” says Sylvia Ann Hewlett, president of the Center for Work-Life Policy and one of the report’s authors.

“Here’s a country heading into a demographic crisis, with lower birth rates and people living a lot longer,” points out Hewlett, who spoke to me earlier today from Tokyo. “[In such an environment], companies can’t simply throw away two-thirds of their female talent and get away with it.”

The findings also suggest a huge opportunity for European and U.S.-headquartered multinationals with operations in Japan. Many of the women indicted they’d prefer to work for these foreign concerns, with nearly seven out of 10 respondents (68 percent) viewing these companies as being much more women-friendly than their Japanese counterparts.

In light of this, you might think European and U.S. multinationals would be poised to take full advantage of this opportunity. But apparently not.

At the event, Hewlett says, a number of U.S. multinationals indicated that they weren’t doing nearly enough when it comes to positioning their companies as potential employers for the workforce segment. Which, in Hewlett’s opinion, is unfortunate. “It could be a real differentiator,” she says.

But perhaps that may soon change, as more studies like this one come to light.

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