Making all Work Fair with Data-Driven Design

When the U.S. Census Bureau first started tracking data on women-owned businesses in 1962, there were only about 400,000 female business owners in the country. Today, there are more than 13 million women-owned businesses. Hello, I'm Chester Elton, and with me is my dear friend and colleague, Adrian Gosselin. Well, thanks, Ches. Yeah, while the number of women-owned businesses is soaring, the gender gap in terms of pay and leadership positions in corporate America still has not been bridged. So how do we achieve quality in the workplace so that everyone has the chance to work more fairly? That's our topic today. As always, we hope the time you spend with us will help reduce the stigma of anxiety at work and in your personal life. And with us is our new friend, Siri Chalasi, a senior researcher at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School. Her life's work is to advance gender equality in the workplace. Siri collaborates with a wide range of organizations around the world, and her work regularly appears in leading media outlets. She has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Master's in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School. Her new book is Make Work Fair, Data-Driven Design for Real Results, released in January from our same publisher, Harper Business. Siri, we're delighted to have you on the podcast. Thank you for finding the time. I'm even more delighted. Thank you, Adrian and Chester, my new friends. So great to be here. So great to be here. So great to be here. So great to be here. So great to be here. So great to be here. So great to be here. Hey, we're thrilled to have you. And first off, I mean, we do a lot of work with organizations and it's so great when you go in with data. You can't argue with data, though some people still do. But help us understand of using this concept of data to bring more fairness to the workplace. Help us understand the big idea of the book. The big idea is exactly what you said. It's that in order to make workplaces more fair, we should manage fairness in exactly the same data driven way that we manage our quote unquote core business. So let's think about an organization that manufactures some products to sell. It could be Apple phones or really anything. An organization would never set out to develop a new product and say, you know, this seems like a good idea. We kind of like it. Let's build it on our own time. Let's launch it when it's ready. Once it goes out into the marketplace, let's just see how many people are going to buy it. Never, right? We would start by doing rigorous market research to understand where the gaps are, what type of product might meet those gaps. Then we have deadlines for product development and production. We would do rigorous user testing to make sure that the product actually works once it's out. Then when it's launched, we would have sales targets, profitability targets. We would be collecting data all the time. This is how we're used to managing what we actually do in our business. So this is exactly the same approach that we should take to making workplaces more fair, ensuring that we are providing a level playing field for all of our employees to do their best work. Does that mean that everybody's gonna become an SVP or CEO? Of course not. Some people are more capable than others. Some people are more inclined to climb the ladder and get all the way to the top. But my co-author, Iris Burnett, and I firmly believe that everyone at least deserves an equal shot to perform to their fullest potential. Well, that just makes way too much sense and is much too logical. I'm guessing you're not getting a lot of traction, are you? You know, Chester, my favorite kind of feedback that I get, especially from people who are initially a little bit skeptical, and they're like, well, tell me, what is your work all about? And when you say you advance gender equality at work, what do you actually do? And I give them a few concrete examples of the types of practices that we've uncovered through research that actually helped to level the playing field. They go, wait, that just sounds like common sense. That just sounds like it would be better business. And they hit the nail on the head with that comment because that's exactly what this is all about. At the end of the day, I think every organization out there, whether they're for-profit, you know, an educational institution like mine, a nonprofit, all organizations want to make sure that they get the right people in the right roles at the right time, doing their best work for the betterment of the organization as a whole. And that's what making work fair is about. Excellent. So my next question, when we first wrote this run of show, it wasn't a very controversial question. All of a sudden, it is. It's this idea that you say that you see in the book organizations well-meaning or investing to make the workplace more fair, are investing more and more resources in the DE&I initiatives. As you know, DE&I has come under tremendous pressure. The new administration has just put all the DE&I workers in the government on paid leave. They're saying they're not gonna do business with companies that have DE&I. You actually don't think those programs work anyway. So how do you create that fairness? I mean, walk us through what the solution might be and what advice would you give companies that all of a sudden have these DE&I departments that are all of a sudden a liability? Yeah, this is all of a sudden become a lot more timely than we even need to expect. Listen, I am a behavioral scientist, right? A researcher. So my whole lens to this work is let's identify and test what actually works and what doesn't to level the playing field. It's not about politics, it's not about ideology, it's about if we want to create these fair workplaces, what works and what doesn't to do it. Thankfully, research has uncovered a lot of ways. When I talk to companies, this fundamental idea of fairness is one that I've always gotten buy-in on, right? Everyone agrees that we wanna hire the best people for the right roles and create the highest performing organizations. I think that ideal is still pretty uncontroversial today. But if that's our shared goal, we have to also acknowledge that there's multiple different paths of getting there. And one path has been these so-called corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI initiatives that have become very popular recently. They include things like training sessions, reunion speaker series, having employee resource groups or affinity groups. And many of these practices have actually been studied, especially diversity training and unconscious bias training, for the last 50 or 60 years, and the evidence simply doesn't suggest that they cause any behavior change. Sometimes those trainings even cause backlash. Certainly sometimes people learn a lot and feel more well-educated when they leave a training session, but then does that mean that they actually make more objective decisions after the training? There's no evidence to support that. So going back to I care about what works and what doesn't, which is why I think we have a big, important opportunity at our hands to shift from some of these popular but ineffective and unproven strategies towards things that actually work. So what does work? I'm happy to tell you. into all the systems and processes that we're already doing. Hiring, evaluating performance, running meetings, having one-on-one meetings with our managers or with our direct reports. This is the everyday work that's already happening in organizations. Making work fair is about doing that stuff a little bit better and a little bit more fairly. So one quick example from hiring, for example, the traditional resume formats, right? You'll list an experience that you had and the exact dates. So management consultant 2010 to 2013. Well, that format makes it really obvious if you ever had a gap in your career for whatever reason. It's like, wait, but the next experience starts in 2015. What was going on between 2013 and 2015? So our colleagues ran a big experiment with more than 9,000 companies in the UK where they tested a revised format where instead of the specific dates attached, they just listed the number of years, the amount of time that a person did a certain job. So management consultant, three years. And guess what happened? When recruiters and employers were looking at those revised resumes, they were better able to focus on candidates actual skin color competencies, because they weren't distracted by any potential gaps in their work history. And in fact, both women and men were more likely to be invited to an interview. And the companies were able to get better talent in the door because they had a more objective and less biased screening process. So this is what making work fair is all about. And that's great, Siri. Not only for, sometimes women can have gaps in their careers if they have a child or if something happens, but every body can, especially this is an Anxiety at Work podcast, somebody may have a time where they need to recover from mental health issues, or you may take time off. We've talked to incredibly successful people who've taken a year or two off because they had to recover from burnout. So this, and it kind of brings me back to the bigger idea of anxiety and linking that. And when we've done our work, unfairness creates incredible feelings of anxiety in the workplace. So what can we do about that? So if I'm an employee in a place where I'm feeling unfairness, what can I do? I understand this from a leader's perspective, but what can I do from maybe an individual contributor's perspective to help in a situation like that? Yeah, well, I think the first important thing to note is all the research suggests it's not about you. I can't tell you how many people I've spoken to who will share experiences of bias or discrimination or just bad behavior in the workplace. And quite naturally, they're like, wait, what did I do wrong? Why is this happening to me? And when I'm able to share some of this evidence that shows, listen, this is a well-documented pattern. You're one of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people who have experienced something similar. I promise it's not just you. It's the system. I think that is very powerful as a first step for people to realize that they're not alone and it's not anything that they did wrong or that it's not their fault. Now, of course, the true solution, as we lay out in the book, is not fixing individuals because the problem is not the individuals, right? The problem is the system, which means the real solutions need to tackle the system. But that said, systems can change both top down or bottom up. And so to anyone who's noticing this, you know, this unseerness in their work, my advice would be if you have the energy and if you have the will, see if there's something you can do about it. One of my favorite examples of this is a gentleman called Roz Atkins. He's a journalist at the BBC based in London. And a couple of years ago, he realized that he had no data on hand about the gender split of all the experts and contributors he was featuring on his nightly news show. He had this one-hour block that he was hosting, and he was having all these people come in and explain the day's news, he had no idea who they were. I mean, he knew who they were, but he weren't tracking any kind of data about those people. So instead of throwing his hands up in the air, Ross said, let's generate the data themselves. We can count. So he and his production team would take two minutes at the end of each night show to tally up on a Post-it, you know, how many women did we have on air in our hour? How many men? And in the beginning, they were actually doing even worse than they thought. They were only featuring 39% women. So they said, well, we can fix this. We want to fix this. Let's set ourselves a target of getting to 50-50. And they did over the course of four months. And then better yet, once they had come up with this new data-driven way of making their journalism more fair or representative of the world that it's designed to reflect, then they started sharing with their colleagues. They had zero power to make anyone else do anything, but they simply went in and said, listen, I'm a fellow journalist just like you. I know how busy you are. I know how unpredictable the news environment can be, but we have this method that we've tried on our own show for the last four months. It's worked with amazing results. You might consider doing something similar. And if you want me to help you in any way, I can share best practices, I can share how we implemented this, I'm here to help. A couple years later, 750 content creating teams across the BBC globally were implementing this 50-50 method as were more than 150 external partner organizations. And it started with one person who was just an individual contributor. Let me ask you, did the ratings go up? Ah, great question. They did. The BBC does regular audience surveys, and in fact, they found that the audience had noticed the increased presence of women in content, in that specifically among the 25 to 54 demographic, which is sort of the most prized demographic for whatever reason, don't ask me why, people were more watching and consuming more content as a result. So yes. Excellent. A couple of things as you're talking that come to mind. One is that in this whole research thing, you said they could count. Adrian and I have problems with that. We would never be data-driven. And when it comes to counting, that's not our strong suit. Once we get past our fingers and toes, we are completely lost. Secondly, you know, as you're saying, look, it's not you, it's the system. That you can have people that push back and say, oh, okay, those are the whiners and complainers. What I really like about what you said was, the system is biased. Here's what you can do as an individual, because in your book, you say, look, it's the leaders that need to make the changes, not the individuals. And yet you just gave me an example of an individual that helped make a change. So when you focus on leaders, what are companies doing to change the mindset of leaders? And what have you found that's successful there? Because obviously there's two ways to do it. In your book, you're saying there's more of an onus on the leader than the individual. So what are companies doing that has worked? Yeah, I think it's the onus is on both leaders and individuals at all levels to do what they can in their own sphere of influence to make work fair, right? So Roz Atkins could influence what his team of five did. He couldn't influence what all of the BBC Global did, even though he ended up doing that through his own example, right? So, I think that's the point, is if you're a senior HR leader, you can overnight wave a magic wand and change how all interviews in your company, let's say, are conducted. When I started in management consulting, I was only six months into the job when I was asked to participate in intern recruiting. So I would conduct interviews with the potential interns for our company. Now I was very junior, so I had no power to change how anybody else did anything, but I had full control over how I conducted my interviews with those prospective interns. And if I had known then what I know now about the science of how to make better and more objective decisions, let me tell you, I would have conducted those interviews totally differently. So that's kind of that idea of like, what can an individual do to change their own work versus what can someone with more organizational power do to change the whole organization? Going back to the connection with anxiety and this idea that people are different, and they require different conditions, right, to do their best work. This sounds so obvious, but surprisingly it's taken us this long to really come around to it in an organizational setting. In other places like in medicine, where personalized medicine is a big trend, we're understanding now that, you know, the same drug doesn't work exactly the same way for all different patients of different ages and body masses and genders and whatever have you. But we're only starting to realize this in organizations. I think remote work is an excellent example. Some people loved working remotely during the pandemic. They were more productive than ever. They were better able to combine their work and life outside of work, and they realized this is what I need to do my best work. Other people were shriveling at home and dying to come back to the office. So if you have a workforce of hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, do you want to now in 2025 implement a one size fits all policy that either forces people to all people to stay at home or forces all of them to come back to the office? Probably not. You'd want to give people some flexibility and freedom to work in the way that suits them best. And I think this is the really important insight, even more broadly, is we need to listen to our people a little bit more. We've invested a lot of time and effort in hiring them. We all know how expensive and difficult hiring is. So if we indeed did a good job and found the best, most capable people, then why would we not trust them and give them the resources and support that they need to do their best work? You know, I'm laughing here because my son works at Goldman Sachs. Clearly, you've never talked to anybody who works at Goldman. As soon as everybody was vaccinated, everybody was back in person five days a week. And if you couldn't do it, they wished you well. So, I love the loss of- We have other clients that are very different. Very different. Yeah. I've got a telecom company I work with and the IT people, when they announced March of 2020, when they sent everybody home, I watched as the customer service people were hugging each other, crying, we won't get to see each other. The IT people were high-fiving, we won't get to see each other. This is awesome, you know? And so it just, I love what you're saying, is about figure out, everybody is unique, everybody's different. Yeah. But you know. Yeah, go ahead. No, I'll just say quickly, I think companies are allowed to want to have different cultures and ways of working. Sure. So I think, you know, these are private, independent entities. Right. So if a company says, listen, we want to enforce culture, which is five days in the office. And by the way, 20, 20 hours a day at that. And we only want people who love this kind of working style. Yeah, I think that's fine. I think it's also important to be very honest and realistic about the tradeoffs. Are you going to get the best talent that way? No, not holistically. You have severely limited your pool of people that you are selecting from, because you are only selecting from a pool of people that are really unable to work 20 hours a day and sit in the office every day. So then at least recognize that and don't tell me, oh, we want everyone to succeed here and we want to have a good workforce, because no, you just made decisions that made it clear that you don't. But it's fine, you're free to make those decisions. I love that. Being an academic, you can say these types of things that are pretty blunt. And that sometimes, you know, Chester and I, we can sell with a lot of CEOs and coach a lot of high-level people. We have to be a little tactful sometimes. You're just giving it bluntly that, look, you're being a knucklehead and you're keeping half your, you know, maybe talented workforce away. Hey, how do people learn more about your work, Siri? Where would you send them to learn more? Makeworksier.com is the website for the book. The book is available everywhere where books are sold globally. And I'm very active on LinkedIn, so I'd love to connect there. I'm Siri Shalazi. That's great. Talk a little bit more about remote work before we end up here, because this is a big one that creates a lot of feelings of, so say a company, and a lot of the companies that Chester and I consult with, they have either hybrid work or they have a lot of remote workers, and then there's just perceived fairness or unfairness about that. What is the solution if you are gonna continue this hybrid world that we have? A lot of companies are finding it, it is quite successful for them, but there's still these feelings of unfairness. How do we resolve that? Yeah, I think the important thing to recognize is that almost all managers and employees before 2020 were trained and used to working in an in-person setting. If you now move to either a fully remote or a hybrid, partially remote mode of working, that's an adjustment, right? And that requires both managers and employees to learn new ways of operating in that new environment. And I think that's why we see in some of the data that employees by and large tend to be much more enthusiastic about remote work and then managers, because that was a big adjustment for managers and they needed to learn to manage people remotely, which is a skill that they didn't have and were kind of just expected to acquire overnight. So the companies that I've looked at that have managed to transition very successfully, like Dropbox, a much bigger company, or Wok Global Media, which went fully remote, you know, more than a decade ago. They invested a lot in training. They invested a lot in teams getting together to collectively define their norms of working, right? Like, what do we expect? When are the hours that we want people to be available and when not? You know, how do we want to communicate? Are we going to use email or Slack or this or that? They actually invested the time to have that transition be really thoughtful and successful. And I think that's really the key. Going back to your question about unfairness specifically, one of the things that we might have to adapt in a hybrid environment is performance evaluations, because so much of traditional performance management has focused on face-to-face surveillance. I need to see you at your computer and I'm going to assume that you're doing something. Well, now if I don't see you ever, except maybe for an hour or two a week on Zoom, I need to change the parameters, the metrics that I use to judge your output, right? So that's where some of the companies that have stumbled have sort of, that's been the major hurdle, is they just assume that their old processes would work in a brand new way of working. But all it takes is adjustment. Yeah. Well, listen, this has been really interesting and beyond fascinating. And I would just say, if you were a little more passionate about this subject, it might come up. You'd have a hold of something, wouldn't you, Siri? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have an opinion, come on. Cheer up. Well, hey, look at the company that I'm in. We're just beating off of each other's energy here. Anyway, give us some of the self-care things that you do to manage your anxiety. I mean, you're at Harvard, it's high pressure, you're writing books, you're doing all this stuff. I know you've got those moments where you kind of say, hey, I need to breathe or do whatever. What are two or three things that you do to manage your anxiety and your mental well-being? You know, movement and exercise for me is the number one, both on days when I feel like doing it and on the days when I feel like I don't. It never fails to make me calmer and make me feel better. Another thing that my husband and I started in COVID, we were doing it a little bit before, but really in COVID, is daily outdoor walks, rain or shine, hot or cold, snow, whatever. There's something about breathing fresh air and being out in nature. We have a beautiful river in Boston, we've got some parks that I find really calming. And then my New Year's resolution for this year, actually, was to really do five minutes of breath work every day. So just to really focus on breathing, trying out different breathing techniques, using kind of taking deeper breaths than I probably do the rest of the day. And I love it. It makes me feel very good. Isn't it funny too, you say five minutes and I'll bet there have been days where you didn't carve out five minutes to change. Yes, yep. Like just knucklehead, right? Take five minutes, right? Anyway, thank you very much, that was very helpful. Thanks, sir. Oh, of course, thank you. Give us one last thought, give us one last takeaway, something you've learned putting this book together that our listeners can take away as well. We all have more power than we even realize to make our own everyday work experiences better and those of colleagues around us. So if there was one thing that people can do in the next two minutes, I would say, think about your own work and identify one thing that you would want to do a little bit differently. Maybe if your job is to update the company's website, you start featuring more diverse imagery on the website, you know, and being thoughtful about that. If you are a venture capitalist or a loan officer, where you have people pitching you, applying for loans, start counting the gender split, or the age split, or the racial split of the entrepreneurs that are pitching for you or the people who are applying for loans, just like Roz Atkins. Next time you sit in a meeting, if someone gets interrupted, jump in and interrupt the interrupter and say, Adrian, I can't wait to hear what you have to say, but could we please let Chester finish his point first? You know? Or if you're giving a presentation, but you did the work with a team, why don't you start the presentation by just mentioning the names of everybody who was involved, giving credit to the full team. You won't imagine how much it'll mean to them to have kind of their contributions recognized. So there's just an infinite number of small things that we each can do every day to make work more fair. That's so great. We asked for one and you gave us 10. You're amazing, Suri. Hey, thank you so much. You're beyond delightful. Likewise. Thank you. Yeah, and don't buy just one, buy two. Buy one for you and one for a friend, right? The book is called, help me out here, Make Work Fair, Data-Driven Design for Real Results. It's Siri Chalasi. She is beyond delightful. Look her up on LinkedIn, follow her, buy her books. Thank you for finding the time. You're beyond delightful. Thank you, friends. This is truly a pleasure. All right, you kick us off, Adrian. You sure we're going to air this one? Adrian, what a delight. Siri Chilazi. You know, it's so funny. You and I were talking when I was rehearsing this. Every time I said her name is Siri, my phone went off. She goes, I know, I apologize. Everybody says that. How she got named after an app, I mean, that's cool. Anyway, this idea of fairness in the workplace and the little things that you can do to make it fair, I think is really important. I think it's really important. I think it's really important. I think it's really important. I think it's really important. I think it's really important. I think it's really important. I think it's really important. I think it's really important. I think it's really important. I think it's really important. I think it's really important. I think it's really important. I think it's really important. I think it's really important. I think it's really important. I mean, that's cool. Anyway, this idea of fairness in the workplace and the little things that you can do, I really found interesting. I'm talking about timely right now with all the things you're talking about, DE&I and how it works, how it doesn't work. She's really saying, look, take all the social stuff out of it. Go to results. Look at the data. I thought of her example of the BBC. Yeah, they counted, which was a simple thing to do, right? How many men, how many women? To me, the real key though was the ratings went up. If they'd done all that stuff and the ratings went down, I'd say, well, you're nuts. She said, get the best people, get the best qualifiers, get the best results. Look at the data, add it up. It's a better way to do business. That's the best argument you can have, right? And it's so true. I mean, you and I did a big year-long project with a big energy company. And I remember when we did the work with the employees, they said, look, we understand environmental things, sustainability. We know how to do that. DE&I scares us. We don't know what to do with it. We want to do it, but we just don't know how to do it. And it was more anxiety-inducing than it was maybe helpful. What her work is saying is, look at small tweaks, things you can really do, like make a list, like ours. How many women to men do we have on our podcast? Simple things you can do. So think about, yeah, those little things you can do. It's the 1% rule, right, versus trying to make sweeping changes, make this incremental, and as you say, make sure it's benefiting your business too. Well, of course it's gonna benefit if you have more gender equality as your people are watching because women wanna see themselves represented when they're watching the news, et cetera. So that just makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I watch TV, I wanna see old bald white guys. You know, with beards. Anyway, the other thing that I thought was interesting is she said, look, I understand that most systems are biased. They've come up through traditions and so on, and yet she didn't blame the system. She said, you can get to leaders. You can say, look, here's the data. Here's why it's better for our company to do that. When she got through her things that she does for her anxiety, isn't it interesting how many people say, go out for a walk, be near nature, take five minutes to do some breathing. I love that. It was five minutes of breathing. We've had guys go, I meditate twice a day for two hours. I go, yeah, I'm not doing that. Simple little things to make sure that you're right. What would you like? A couple of things. You're asking for one I'll give you two actually one is the data runs our business so let data run this and And that's when this becomes really powerful is when you know sometimes we work with D&I departments Which we think you know are doing some great work HR departments that are doing great work, but they have to be data-driven Yeah, you have to show the benefit of your work, that's when it goes from being a department to being integral to the organization. The second point that she made that is so important here about making work fair is that work is not fair for everybody. If I were the two of our managers, I would manage me very differently than I would manage you, you know? Sure. And she's saying, but this idea of remote work or D&I, everybody's the same. No, they're not. And people need to be managed very differently. My IT guys are probably gonna be managed very differently than my customer service folks. They're just different personalities and be aware of that. Find out what motivates people and as you always say, find out their stories. See, if you know their story, you're gonna know what motivates them. Yeah, my last takeaway is when she says, you've got more power than you realize. You know, take a look at your work, do one thing and take it from there. But yeah, the book, and we've mentioned it a couple of times, but I love it. It's a Make Work Fair, data-driven design for real results. Harper Business, we love them. They're our publisher too. It's coming out January 2025, pick up a copy. Adrian, I always give you the last word, so have at it. You know, big thanks to our producer, Brent Klein, who we think is always fair with us. Christy Lawrence, who is amazing and finding great guests to balance us out. And to all of you who have listened in, if you like the podcast, share it, let others know about it. We'd also love you to visit thecultureworks.com for some free resources. And Chester, there's a book that everybody should pick up. It begins with a A. What is that book? Anxiety at Work. That's the one. You know, you put me on the spot like that, it made me really anxious. Anyway, by the way, we love to speak to audiences, whether it's virtual, whether it's in person, on all these subjects of culture, leadership, teamwork, and of course, anxiety in the workplace. Thank you so much for taking time to be with us on the podcast. It means a lot to us. Follow us on LinkedIn, go to our website, and thanks again for being a part of the show. Adrian, the big wrap up. Thanks everybody for joining us. Until next time, we wish you the best of mental health.