This post originally appeared on Launchways.com

The Long-Awaited “Future of Work” Has Come Early, and Brought Surprises Galore

Particularly in the last few years, Thought Leaders have been heralding the approach of “The Future of Work,” imagining a model of what “work” would look like in a world of abundant emerging technologies including artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation. That future vision has typically focused on the need to manage a shift of the workforce to virtual, remote, and alternative models to full-time staff (gig-based, contract-based, and part-time labor, for example).

Enter COVID-19, and the timetable has changed, and brought with it a number of unexpected features. In a matter of weeks, we’ve seen non-essential workers being told to work from home (WFH) while sheltering-in-place. Organizations, in an effort to recalibrate their budgets in tightened consumer and supply chain markets, have done their best to be creative by adapting HR policies and employment contracts to allow for safer working conditions, flexible hours, and many have reduced their workforce resulting in employees being shifted to subcontractors, part-time status, or have simply been laid off, forcing them to seek new income opportunities from home.

Who would have guessed that these disrupting shifts to work-from-home would coincide, hand-in-hand, with equally disrupting shifts to school-from-home, making working parents into teachers as well? And who would have predicted the explosive and breathtaking speed of almost-universal adoption of Zoom and other web-conferencing services?

This is not the graceful, opportunity-driven entrance into the future we may have envisioned. In fact, initial waves of surprises produced longings for a “return to normal.” But, more recently, subsequent waves of signals from the future have pointed toward possible shapes of things to come. Many uncertainties remain, but some things have become quite clear. We most certainly aren’t going “back to normal!” The past has passed, and it is not coming back. Winners and losers will be defined by their agility in adopting new technologies, by the ability to learn and innovate quickly, and by how well they attract and retain top talent.

Competing for Talent in the Future of Work

In a world where more companies’ workforce is remote/virtual, the geographic and financial constraints of recruiting melt away. Suddenly, teams have an opportunity to pursue a truly global talent pool in a more democratized way—allowing them to expand their talent search beyond their local zip codes.

The expansion goes beyond geography. Entire populations of people for whom a traditional office role is challenging, unsafe, or even impossible are finally able to access the labor market in a more equitable and inclusive way. These include, just to name a few:

• Individuals with significant physical disabilities
• Individuals who are gender nonconforming or going through a gender transition
• Individuals with phobias or other mental health challenges
• Individuals with chronic or acute health conditions
• Neurodiverse individuals
• Caregivers, whether for children or aging/ill family members

These types of barriers to workplace accessibility can be easier to accommodate in a remote-work context. Individuals can curate their space and constraints to meet their own needs, particularly if their organization provides proper technology, infrastructure and policies to support them.

The Best Talent is Diverse

The greatest talent in the world includes members of populations who are suddenly gaining access in this new normal. If your organization is hiring the best talent without bias, members of your team will represent a wide array of cultures and identities.

Not only is diversity an inevitable outcome of unbiased recruitment practices, but the data shows diverse teams far outperform homogenous teams. This ROI has been proven time and time again — reports by Forbes, Mercer, the Harvard Business Review, and many more demonstrate that a diversified workforce drives innovation and business growth — bottom line: diverse organizations perform better.

Here’s How: Practice Inclusion and Equity Throughout your Employee Lifecycle

• It starts with Attraction.
  • Inclusive employer branding, content marketing, events and continuous networking
• Talent Acquisition and Recruitment.  
  • Engaging diverse talent, identify diverse sourcing opportunities, curb unconscious biases, reduce barriers to application process, create transparent process and develop culturally intelligent communication practices
• Hiring and Onboarding
  • Transparency, over-communication and personalization can make all the difference
  • Combat bias by building a fair and consistent processes
  • Build interview guides and scorecards that are clear and objective
• Employer Benefits and Compensation
  • Tailor your offerings to meet the needs of your diverse workforce with an ultimate goal of engaging and retaining your top talent
  • Promotion of wellness programming is more important now than ever before
  • Re-evaluate and optimize for equity and gender parity
• Employee Engagement and Training & Development
  • Make it a regular practice to check-in with your employees. Conduct pulse-surveys that specifically gauge inclusion, equity and belonging. 
  • Cultivate an inclusive culture
  • Offer inclusive and accessible learning experiences and develop clear learning/career pathways
• Performance Management
  • Here’s your opportunity to acknowledge, celebrate and reward for each team member’s cultural contribution, unique ways of working, and fostering a culture of inclusion!
  • This is also an opportunity to re-evaluate your performance metrics. Some questions you may want to ask yourself includes:
    • Is your process fair, equitable and inclusive?
    • Are your policies unintentionally punitive or do they lean towards corrective action?
• Foster Community
  • Create, support, and invest in Employee Resource/Affinity Groups

The Future is Yours!

Now is the time to catch the wave of change and surf it to success—don’t get pulled into the undertow of clinging to old ways of working! Here are a few steps to move your organization towards the future of work:

1. Harness the inclusion capacity of your organization. Identify the innovative, forward-thinking, and inclusion-minded changemakers in your organization. Activate them toward a goal of fostering inclusion. Empower them to set audacious goals and affect disruptive change when needed, and support them with leadership buy-in.
2. Get help. When you have reached the bounds of your team’s capacity for in-house inclusion efforts, partner with inclusion experts like The Darkest Horse to bring in external support for consulting, training, facilitation, and events/experiences.
3. Use the right tools. Work with an HR and Benefits expert like Launchways to ensure your HR processes and benefits packages meet the needs of a modern workforce.
4. Keep learning!

DIVERSITY: So Hot Right Now. But We’re Totally Over It.

Okay, here’s the deal; leaders everywhere have been reading about “the business case for diversity” for years now — there is decades worth of research demonstrating conclusively that diverse teams drive better business outcomes in financial performance, innovation, market share, team collaboration, and more. And The Darkest Horse is thankful that this recognition has advanced DEI initiatives, and paved ways for future progress BUT, we caution leaders not to get distracted with the “D” word.

The problem is when leaders start with diversity, they narrowly focus on vanity metrics. Leaders become obsessed with getting the demographic numbers right, and immediately turn to recruiting as the solution to the “diversity problem.” Too often, we see companies superficially look to their talent pipeline as the singular path to success. Unsurprisingly, when they take inventory of through their applicant pool, they end up with a sea of people who mostly match the demographics of their existing workforce and their implicit bias enables them to form assumptions. From that vantage point, it seems to be a “pipeline problem,” and attracting “diverse talent” appears beyond your control. 

Now there is truth that marginalization and inequity of access to jobs opportunities does go all the way back to childhood (or in the case of Black Americans, before birth due to generations of oppression and unfair disadvantage) there is no denying that reality. That said, there are scores of blow-your-mind talented folks of all demographics and identities ready to join your company right now.

However, focusing on recruiting alone is not going to get them in the door or automatically make them successful at your organization, and here’s why…

Diversity Is A Lagging Metric.

Before we go into our diatribe, let’s level-set and review some key definitions to make sure we’re all working with the same conceptual understanding:

• Diversity is a numbers game — pursuing diversity means examining and questioning the makeup of a group to ensure that multiple perspectives are represented.
• Inclusion is an intentional, ongoing effort to ensure that diverse individuals are valued and fully participate. If diversity is having a range of folks in the room, inclusion is making sure those folks know that they don’t need to assimilate to match a norm, but rather are celebrated for the unique qualities they bring. Where inclusion is the action, a sense of belonging is the outcome. 
• Equity is the fair and just treatment of all members of a group. Note that this is not the same as equality — where equality is giving everyone the same thing, equity is about giving each individual what they need to be successful, recognizing that different needs are not special accommodations, they’re just different accommodations.
• Accessibility is giving equitable opportunity to everyone along the continuum of human ability and experience, making space for the characteristics and skillsets that each person brings.

When we help organizations think about these challenges, we flip the order. We start with accessibility. If the full range of potential team members cannot access you, it’s a non-starter. There are several types of accessibilities scenarios, below is a short list to consider: 

• Physical accessibility – If you do nothing else, make sure that your office space is at least ADA compliant
• Cognitive, Learning and Neurological – Are you taking into consideration how well people process and comprehend the information you provide? Are your written materials long and verbose? Does your website have distracting animations or obnoxiously loud audio?
• Geographic accessibility – Does your geographic location keep attracting a certain type of employee demographic? Do employees need to own a car or pay for an Uber/Lyft every day to get to your office? Is your office accessible via public transit? 
• Digital accessibility – Does your organization promote asynchronous collaboration? Can everyone access your technology? Regardless of whether they can manipulate a mouse — have you indexed for how much vision they have, how many colors they can see, how much they can hear, or how they process information?
• Time accessibility – Is that critical daily huddle scheduled at the same time working parents need to get their kids logged into Zoom or dropped off to daycare? Are you scheduling meetings that are inconvenient for your teammates who live in a different time zone?

We hate to be the bearers of bad news, BUT if you haven’t taken the time to get accessibility right, there isn’t a headhunter in the world or some awesome company perk that will magically convince “diverse” talent to line up outside your door. The good news is: our shortlisted examples are low-hanging fruit that doesn’t cost a lot of time or money to actually address, so start making those adjustments ASAP! 

Up next, we turn to equity and inclusion. Once a wide range of diverse people can actually access you, they need to know they’ll be treated (and compensated) fairly, and that their identities will not just be accepted or tolerated, but celebrated and supported. This is where retention comes in. Believing that rewards will be commensurate with effort helps drive employee engagement, commitment, and productivity. This sense of equity, plus the sense of belonging results from effective inclusion practices, creates a cultural belief that employees can have a bright future at your company and makes them want to stay and claim it. 

Success on these efforts leads to diversity as a consequence. If you focus on creating a work environment where the very best talent can thrive — where your organization is accessible, equitable, and inclusive across demographic and identity spectra — you will start to attract and retain the best talent. We recognize that the best talent looks, sounds, and thinks a lot of different ways and we want leaders to start noticing this too.

The Future Of Work Demands That You Figure This Out

As more and more roles are shifting to a virtual/remote context, organizations have the opportunity to compete for a literal world of talent! In short: if you don’t figure out how to create the accessibility, inclusion, equity that will draw folks in, and a culture that helps you keep that awesomely diverse talent, your competitors will. The limitations of your organizational culture and make up of your workforce will directly inform your ability to thrive in the current marketplace and ultimately prepare for the future of work.