By Kimberly Kafafian

 

Pandemic aside, a new poll from Gallup indicates that the percentage of workers who feel that their employer cares about their wellbeing has plummeted. Back in May of 2020, 49% felt that their organizations had a genuine concern for them, their work and their lives. But that number has now drastically dropped to 24%! 

Employers need to take serious note of this double digit decrease. Why? Because according to Gallup’s findings, workers who believe their employer actually cares about their wellbeing are:

• 69% less likely to actively seek out a new job
• 71% less likely to report experiencing significant burnout
• Five times more likely to strongly promote their company as a place to work 
• Three times more likely to be engaged at work

One way to demonstrate your organization cares is through the development of a robust employee health and wellness program. 

What Is a Wellness Program?

A wellness program is a workplace initiative specifically created to support and improve the physical and/or mental health of employees. There is no standard one size fits all approach to employee wellness programs. They should be tailored specifically for your team and evolve to meet shifting needs and wants. 

What to Offer in Your Health and Wellness Program

Wellness programs can include a multitude of features. In having worked with organizations across sectors and industries throughout the United States, I’ve found that wellness programs tend to offer a mix of the following, among other things:

Health Screenings

Providing in office screenings like blood pressure checks and BMI measurements can arm employees with medical information they may not routinely seek out.

Health Workshops

Your employees may want to improve their health but aren’t sure what they should be doing. Offer educational events such as stress reduction, healthy cooking classes, and smoking cessation workshops.

Gym or Exercise Class Memberships

Workers may not exercise because it is simply too cost prohibitive or they don’t have time to fit it into their schedule. Subsidizing gym memberships or providing a fitness center on site can help them pursue the healthy lifestyle they want but have been unable to achieve.

Fitness Challenges

Motivate employees to improve their physical and mental health with challenges and prizes for things like walking a mile each day, giving up smoking, eating more healthily, losing weight, or drinking more water.

Walking Groups

Organize early morning or lunchtime walking groups. Your teams could use the break and also benefit from the socialization.

Company Sports Teams

Team sports such as softball not only provide an outlet for exercise, but also an opportunity for workers to bond and form friendships.

Healthy Snacks and Meals

Stock your workspace with snacks like fresh fruit and protein bars. If you have a cafeteria, make sure it includes healthy options. Healthy eating can lead to better energy and more productivity.

Recreation/Game Rooms

Taking a break can help you see things in a different light. Create a space where your team can work as a team in a non-work setting to clear the mind and foster collaboration.

Relaxation Rooms

It’s no secret that today’s workers are experiencing unprecedented rates of burnout. A quiet place can help them destress and re-energize during the day.

Onsite Health Clinic

Depending upon the size of the organization, an onsite health clinic may be a great perk and help to address absenteeism.

Monthly Massages

Create a monthly spa day where employees can receive 10 minute chair massages.

Wellness program options are limitless. The above list is just some ideas to get you going. I’d love to hear what your organization is doing to improve the health and wellness of its employees.

By Kimberly Kafafian

 

With it being World Autism Month, I want to call attention to a topic I’m very passionate about: neurodiversity. You might have heard this term being thrown around as the latest workplace buzzword, but do you understand what it means and why it is so beneficial for organizations to take it to heart?

In his book The Power of Neurodiversity, Thomas Armstrong encourages people to realize that there is no standard for the human brain. Rather, there is an infinite range of brain function and behavioral traits. This is the concept of neurodiversity – and it is so empowering! The term is usually used to describe people who while bringing a host of talents to the table, may also need some extra support. The referred to group tends to include people with autism, ADHD, dyslexia and other neurological conditions. 

Many leaders have mistakenly clung to the notion that this extra support is not worth the effort, but research actually indicates that neurodiverse workers can be 30% more productive! In fact, some of the world’s leading companies have successful neurodiverse programs. Here are just a few and the benefits they have experienced:

• Microsoft not only has a neurodiversity program, it has built an entire hiring program that affords neurodiverse individuals the ability to demonstrate their strengths and qualifications in non-traditional ways.
• PwC believes “attracting, retaining and developing talented, diverse professionals — including individuals with disabilities — is a business imperative to help spur innovation, drive growth and sustain competitive advantage in the marketplace.”
• JP Morgan has stated that their autistic employees achieve 48% to 140% more work than their typical colleagues. 
• SAP started their Autism at Work program back in 2013 and has a 90% retention rate of employees on the autism spectrum. 
• EY found that its neurodivergent employees excelled at innovation with their diversity of thought being the differentiator.

What organizations need to start understanding is that when they truly embrace neurodiversity, they can tap into a pool of talent that can successfully tackle the required tasks in today’s data-driven world, boosting the bottom line. Neurodiverse individuals often excel in key areas, such as interpreting data, analyzing data and thinking logically. Plus, neurodiversity offers other benefits like overcoming groupthink and tackling talent shortages. 

 What are you doing to include neurodiverse talent in your organization?

Here Are Some Tips to Help You Attract and Retain Neurodiverse Talent

1. Determine where your organization can benefit from diverse skills

Take a deep dive and identify the right fit in terms of needed skill sets and where the neurodiverse worker will be comfortable. 

2. Pay Careful Attention to the Language You Use

By language, I mean both how you refer to neurodiverse candidates and workers, as well as in your recruitment strategy. You want to make sure your job descriptions capture the eye of neurodiverse candidates. Avoid fluff, wish lists and generic descriptions. Instead, get down to the basics, focus on values, and highlight how your company welcomes neurodiverse talent. 

3. Include Your Neurodiversity Initiatives in Your Employer Branding

Let everyone know about neurodiversity in your workplace. Include a page or section about it on your website, share employee stories on social media, and promote your initiatives on LinkedIn.

4. Tweak Your Recruitment and Hiring Process 

There is no greater place to acknowledge that there is no standard or normal brain than in your recruitment and hiring practices. While they have the skills to do the job, the neurodivergent tend to not interview well. As I mentioned above, Microsoft built an entire hiring program around neurodiverse individuals. Many of the “normal” recruitment and hiring processes almost immediately rule out the neurodivergent. Just small talk or eye contact alone can be overwhelming. A few tweaks can make all the difference in your recruitment:

• Let candidates “show” you what they can do rather than tell you
• Send the candidates your interview questions in advance to help them better prepare verbal answers
• Avoid vague questions
• Consider using online assessments and/or phone screenings

It’s time to end the stigma and embrace all that a neurodiverse workplace can offer to both workers and the organization overall. But if you want to attract the talent, you need to make sure that your recruitment and hiring initiatives enable you to do so.

 

By Kimberly Kafafian

 

Dear HR People: Let’s play out a real life scenario, hopefully one that’s happening in real time at your organization. Knowing that the benefits outweigh the challenges, you’ve finally convinced your leadership team to embrace neurodiversity. You’ve expanded your definition of DEIB to include the neurodivergent, and identified the best fitting roles for your neurodiverse candidates. Your marketing team has tweaked your brand story to let everyone know you welcome the neurodivergent. And your team has adapted your recruitment processes to attract neurodiverse talent and enable them to shine during your selection process. Congratulations, you’re halfway there! Yes, you read that right: I said halfway. If you want your neurodiversity initiatives to be successful, you need to also make changes that support neurodiversity in the workplace. Like what, you ask? Below are some tips we give our clients for creating a culture and environment where both neurodiverse and neurotypical talent can thrive.

Put Accommodations in Place that Respect Differences

Everyone works differently and that is especially true for the neurodivergent. Management needs to ascertain how each team member works best and then adjust the environment and established processes accordingly. Some examples of typical accommodations include:

• Clear, multi-step instructions
• Reiteration of instructions
• Communication using action words
• Follow up calls and emails to reinforce discussions or directions
• Work hours that focus on output rather than time
• Headphones for those who have issues with auditory stimulation
• Desks that convert from sitting to standing
• Offering sensory objects
• Dedicated quiet spaces

Provide a Mentor and/or Work Buddy

All workers can benefit from mentors and close work colleagues, but they are perhaps even more important for your neurodivergent talent. They can help provide career direction, bolster skill development, and be a supportive sounding board, as well as help create opportunities down the road. And together, they can share their strengths.

Encourage Flexibility and Inflexibility

Flexibility has definitely been a buzzword over the last two years. Leadership has realized that people can work from home and be productive. This workplace flexibility is great for those who may have social anxiety or difficulty engaging well with others. On the other hand, some neurodivergent workers are more successful when there are routines – such as going to an office space every day. 

Supporting neurodiversity in the workplace requires effort, but the benefits – such as differing perspectives and skill sets – are worth it. It’s good for the company and its talent.

By Kimberly Kafafian

3-15-22

Today is Equal Pay Day. For those who don’t know the significance of this day, in essence the date marks how far into the year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year. Why do we mark this measurement? It’s because for every $1.00 a white male earns:

• White women make $.79
• Black women make $.64
• Hispanic women make $.57

With it being March 15th, that means that women on average had to work an additional 2.5 months to make up for the pay gap! The fact that in 2022 women still have to work so much more than a man to earn the same pay evokes a range of emotions: sadness, anger and shock. In 2021, the date was March 24th, so I guess we’ve made some sort of progress. But according to a new Pew Research Center report that advancement must be minimal. It found that the gender gap in pay has remained relatively stable in the U.S. over the past 15 years or so, with women earning only 84% of what men earned. 

Explanations for the Gap in Pay Equity

According to the Pew Research report, much of the pay gap is attributed to educational discrepancies, occupational segregation and work experience. Although the number of women in higher-paying professional and managerial positions that were traditionally dominated by men has increased, women are still overrepresented in lower-paying occupations which don’t require higher education. These education and segregation explanations are supported by other research. PayScale’s Gender Pay Gap Report for 2021 noted that without controlling for factors such as education and occupation, women make only $.82 for every dollar a man makes. When comparing job title, years of experience, education, industry, location and other compensable factors, women in the controlled group make $0.98 for every $1.00 a man makes. So these two factors have a huge impact on the pay gap.

The experience factor impacts all education and occupation levels. Let’s face it, most women are the default parent.  As such, many women leave the workforce to be the main family caregiver. This interruption in career path has a significant impact on long-term earning potential. And the pandemic has only compounded the problem. Shutdowns pushed women in front-line positions out of the workforce forcing an experience gap. Even professionals who could work remotely took a hit to their careers as they had to leave their jobs for childcare reasons when schools closed. Right now, women’s participation in the labor force is at a 33-year low as more women take on caretaker roles.  This staggering statistic is underscored by a MetLife poll which found that 48% of respondents believe the pandemic negatively impacted their careers, with one in five saying they were pushed out of the workforce altogether.

The Pay Gap’s Impact on Lifetime Income Puts it All Into Perspective

Just think about those extra 2.5 months women need each year to catch up to their male counterparts. Now, add that up into years over a lifetime. If men and women retired at the same age, after working the same number of years, consider how much more income a man would have earned. It can be hundreds of thousands of dollars! In fact, according to a study by Lean In, women lost an average of $406,280 over the lifetime because of the pay gap. 

How Can We Reach Gender Pay Equity?

Despite all the gains, there’s still so much that needs to be done to erase the gap. One initiative that’s making strides is pay transparency. More and more jurisdictions are requiring proactive pay scale disclosure, which will hopefully narrow the wage discrepancies. But women need to be proactive as well. They should become knowledgeable of average salaries and seek higher pay when negotiating salaries and pay raises. As an HR professional, I know employers need to take significant actions. They must eradicate gender discrimination in the workplace and do a better job with their DEIB initiatives. Companies should also proactively promote parental and family leave for all genders so that the impact on careers is more balanced. Leaders need to take the lead here, such as the case with Twitter’s CEO, who after only three months on the job is taking parental leave. Working together is what will make the difference.

 

By Kimberly Kafafian

 

I started my HR career in compensation. Part of my responsibility at that time was to market price entire departments to ensure external competitiveness. I remember how bizarre – and deeply bothersome – it was to focus on external competitiveness while being forced to ignore the disparate pay levels between men and women within the same department. In every department, there was always one “outlier” – someone who made a tremendous amount more than the rest of their peers. And yes, that person was always a white male.

Despite the fact that women have earned more bachelor’s degrees than men since 1982, more master’s degrees than men since 1987, and more doctorate degrees than men since 2006, the gender wage gap continues. One strategy to bring about pay equality that’s gaining momentum is pay transparency. As an HR professional, I’ve witnessed this become one of the fastest growing topics in my profession. Why? Because not only does pay transparency work to close the gap across many industries, occupations and positions, it also supports regulatory compliance and offers other key benefits to the organization overall – including leverage during the Great Resignation.

Proof that Pay Transparency Pays Off

Compensation data and software firm PayScale released a report based on 1.6 million responses about compensation over a two-year period. According to its findings, pay transparency works across the majority of industries, occupations and job levels. It found:

• When respondents agree that there is pay transparency in their organization, the gender wage gap vanishes for women doing similar jobs as men, provided all compensable factors are adjusted
• There are a few notable exceptions where pay does not quite equalize across industries: retail and customer service, accommodation and food services, arts/entertainment/ recreation, transportation and warehousing 
• There are also some exceptions across occupations: construction and extraction, sales and related, food preparation and serving related, production, installation/maintenance/ repair, protected services – which tend to be male dominated jobs
• A gender gap is still evident at the director and executive levels

Despite the discrepancies, adopting transparent pay is one step toward pay equality.

Salary Disclosure Laws Help to Push Transparency

In my generation, along with previous generations, talking about how much money you make has been taboo. And companies traditionally have held this information close to the vest. So, your counterparts’ salaries were pretty much a mystery. But now with the internet, salary information is right at our fingertips from sites like Glassdoor and LinkedIn. You can even find it on social media. Today, discussing salary with your co-workers is protected by law, and more and more states are enacting laws that allow job seekers to know a position’s pay range when they interview. While this can help with salary negotiation, for pay transparency to work, it needs to come directly from the organizations themselves. 

Many organizations, however, feel trepidation about taking such a leap and have pushed back against transparency afraid of employee disputes. But in some states they have no choice. Pay transparency laws are popping up all over the country. The trend started in California back in 2018, when the golden state required employers to provide external applicants with the pay scale if it was requested and the first interview was complete. Similar laws have been enacted in Maryland, as well as Cincinnati and Toledo, Ohio. Washington passed a version of the law, but expanded it to include internal applicants upon request after the initial offer. 

In time, pay scale disclosures laws started requiring proactive actions. Connecticut employers must provide the salary range to external candidates at offer and current employees at role change or upon request. In Nevada, employers must provide the range to current employees interviewing for new roles and external applicants post-interview or upon request.

New York City is going even further by requiring employers with at least four New York City employees to include the minimum and maximum salary on all job postings.

For jurisdictions where the disclosures aren’t mandatory, it’s up to HR teams to make leadership see their benefits of adopting a transparent pay process.

Pay Transparency Brings Benefits Beyond Closing the Gender Wage Gap

When organizations adopt pay transparency, they realize additional benefits that HR teams should bring to their attention to bring them on board:

• Regulatory compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which can help protect against lawsuits
• When organizations commit to a compensation strategy that values employees, they make themselves more attractive to top talent and enhance employee engagement, in turn boosting retention rates and profits
• According to a LinkedIn report, the professionals that practice pay transparency found that it makes the hiring process more efficient by streamlining negotiations and that it helps ensure fair pay among race and gender

Pay transparency isn’t enough on its own to eradicate the gender wage gap, but it can have a significant impact.