According to the most recent “Women in the Workplace” report from LeanIn.Org and McKinsey, the gap between men and women leaving their jobs is the largest it has been since the report was first published eight years ago.  For every female director who is promoted, two women at the same level of seniority choose to quit. The report states that women are leaving companies that fail to deliver on “the cultural elements of work that are critically important to them.”

Culture is our lived experience of work, and for women today, the lived experience of work isn’t great. For example, the Women at Work report by Deloitte published this year finds that 10% more women are experiencing; harassment, microaggressions and exclusion at work compared to a year ago. Overall, this is an increase from 51% to 59% of women. 

To understand how pervasive toxic cultures are, Charles Sull, cofounder of CultureX and Donald Sull, senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and cofounder of CultureX analyzed the language that 3 million U.S. employees used in Glassdoor reviews to describe their employer between 2016 and 2021.

What they found is a gender gap in men and women’s experiences of toxic workplace cultures. Overall Women spoke more negatively than men about most elements of culture, including work-life balance and collaboration. The largest gap between the genders however, is for toxic culture, which they define as a workplace culture that is disrespectful, no inclusive, unethical, cutthroat, or abusive.

On todays episode Charlie Sull joins us on the show to discuss these issues.

Even if employees don’t quit, employees in toxic environments are more likely to disengage from their work, exert less effort, and bad-mouth their employer to others. Sustained exposure to a toxic culture increases the odds that employees will suffer from anxiety, depression, burnout, and serious physical health issues.

Given the impact toxic workplace cultures can have on our mental and emotional wellbeing, it is important we understand how to solve this issue.

Here Charlie shares what we can do.

Action One: Be nicer to people - dilute the toxic culture.

Action Two: Report toxic behaviour to HR, if you witness it or it is happening to you.

Action Three:  Take reliable data to senior leadership and keep talking about it to ensure senior management realize that this is a problem and place the item on the agenda of the CEO.  Don’t lose your voice.

CultureX

For most people we want feedback at work, but it is also something we dread. Unless feedback is actionable and helpful, it just feels like unnecessary criticism or a way for organizations to try and get people to fit into toxic workplace cultures.

In the HBR article entitled Women Get “Nicer” Feedback — and It Holds Them Back authors  Lily Jampol, Aneeta Rattan and Elizabeth Baily Wolf shared how their research finds even if their male and female employees perform at exactly the same level, managers tend to prioritize kindness more when giving feedback to women than when giving the same feedback to men.

Across a series of studies, we asked more than 1,500 MBA students, full-time employees, and managers based in the U.S. and the UK to imagine giving developmental feedback to an employee who needed to improve their performance. The employee was described in exactly the same way to all participants, except that half were told the employee’s name was Sarah, while the other half were told the employee’s name was Andrew. We then asked the participants about their goals going into this conversation, and while they all said they wanted to give candid feedback, those who were told the employee was named Sarah were significantly more likely than those who were told the employee was named Andrew to prioritize being kind as well. This was true regardless of the gender or political leanings of the person giving the feedback: Whether they self-identified as male or female, liberal or conservative, our participants consistently reported being more motivated to be kind when giving feedback to a woman than when giving it to a man.

Joining us on the podcast today is Lily Jampol, Partner and Head of People Science and Services at ReadySet and Aneeta Rattan, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at London Business School, where we will unpack all things feedback related.

In their article for HBR, Lily, Aneeta and Elizabeth share that constructive feedback is essential for anyone’s growth. Most of what we learn at work – around 70% happens informally and on the job. We learn through the feedback we get, it is literally how we develop our social and technical skills.

But as a manager, it can be challenging to get the balance right between being kind but also clear and firm.

Given the important role that feedback had on an employee’s development, engagement and performance, we need leaders to understand how to get it right. Here Lily shares four actions we can use to improve the feedback we give:

Action One:

Create a culture of feedback systems and behavioral approaches.

Action Two:

Establish common touch points so early intervention takes place when employees seem to be struggling.

Action Three:

Prepare your feedback sessions, what are the three things you want to get across in your feedback?

Action Four:

Review the feedback which has been given, take an audit to use for future feedback sessions.

Lily Jampol

Aneeta Rattan

For many people International Women’s Day has lost its way. It is too readily used by corporates as a day to provide lip service to gender equality and women’s advancement at work.

But women don’t need one day of celebration, we need companies to take action every day to remove the barriers to women’s advancement and fulfillment at work.

Without action it is too easy for men, women and all individuals to become fatigued, disengaged and disillusioned with efforts to advance gender equality.

To prevent this, we wanted to share our list of dos and don’ts to help people celebrate IWD in a meaningful way.

Joining us on the show today is guest host Selina Suresh. Selina works with Michelle at The Culture Practice and she also worked for UN Women in New York and Nepal.

We need workplaces to look at the ideal worker behaviors they reward, endorse and support that create cultures of inequality at work. We need workplaces to make significant, meaningful efforts to change their cultures, so that they work for everyone.

Often around IWD time, you might hear a few men say, what about men?! Why don’t we have a day specifically dedicated to men’s advancement? Well that's simple, men already dominate most leadership positions, they don’t face the same degree of discrimination and marginalization that women do. Workplaces already work for men. The real reason this question is asked, is all too often IWD initiative's can forget about men, and the important role they play in advancing gender equality at work.

Action: Don’t get sucked into performative events or platitudes or pink merchandise (no matter how enticing it might appear)! Recognize that this day was created by advocates and for advocates dedicated to advancing women, all women in all areas of life. It’s a day of meaningful action and the best way to celebrate it is by challenging yourself to do more.

Visit https://onehundredactions.com/ use these actions to make change today.

Every year companies spend about $8 billion on DEI initiatives in the United States, according to research conducted by the consulting firm McKinsey.

With all this money and attention given to DEI efforts we need to ask ourselves an important question: Who benefits?

A 2019 report entitled Being Black in Corporate America: An Intersectional Exploration released by the consulting firm Coqual, finds that black professionals are more likely to encounter prejudice and microaggressions than any other racial or ethnic group.

They are less likely than their white counterparts to have access to senior leaders and to have support from their managers.

Yet few white professionals see what their black colleagues are up against. 65% of black professionals say that black employees have to work harder in order to advance, but only 16% of their white colleagues agree with that statement.

The study also finds that black professionals are more likely than white professionals to be ambitious, and they are more likely to have strong professional networks.

In this episode, Lanaya Irvin, CEO at Coqual, explains Coqual’s report findings in more detail. 

Coqual recently launched a study around black talent in the UK.  We saw a similar perception gap.  There's this material gap in perception that makes overcoming this, these hurdles of retention, development, advancement that much more difficult.  This happens because the gap between what employees are experiencing and what their peers or their managers understand or believe, is really wide.

The starting point is recognizing that we must account for all areas of difference and different lived experiences in understanding inequality and addressing the issues it creates.

Here Lanaya shares with us three actions we can all use in bridging this gap:

Action One: Lift up the ideas of others in order to foster a sense of belonging.

Action Two: Have clear expectations around how you can advance or gain promotions at work.

Action Three:  Embrace all differences of those around you whether it be a person’s skillset, their unique contributions to work or their challenges.

Lanaya Irvin

Coqual

Research is telling us is that hybrid working is something most employees want, it does increase our productivity because we don’t have to commute, and most companies are likely to keep it in place, but it comes at a cost.

We need to be aware of these costs so we can manage them. Hybrid working does increase stress, loneliness, isolation, and disengagement. In many ways it is culture eroding. That doesn’t mean we get rid of hybrid working. I believe it is here to stay. Rather it means we need to be aware of these challenges so we can take action to solve them.

The consulting firm Deloitte has for the second year released its Women @ Work 2022: A Global Outlook report, a survey of 5,000 women across 10 countries The survey provides a unique glimpse into the lives of women in the workplace amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The responses from around the globe made it clear that women’s “everyday” workplace experiences were having a detrimental impact on their engagement and that the pandemic was having a severe impact on women’s lives and careers, including their work/life balance and wellbeing.

Emma Codd, Global Inclusion Leader for Deloitte joins me on the podcast today to discuss the report’s findings in more detail. We discuss the issues women face with hybrid working, flexible working and overcoming the barriers to their advancement at work.

Emma states that women that work in a hybrid manner which was around half of the respondents that can work in a hybrid way, of those respondents, 60% said they'd experienced exclusion in the past year.  Around 50% said they weren't getting the access they needed to leaders which we all know how important sponsorship is for anybody that is in an underrepresented group is so important.  Suddenly that's not there anymore.

Emma states there are four questions every organization globally should be asking; often only needing tweaks to resolve the outcome, but still action taking place:

Question One: Does your culture allow employees to feel safe when asking for flexible working? If not, how can it change?

Question Two: Do all employees feel connected?  If not, why not?

Question Three: Do all employees belong? Why do employees feel isolated?

Question Four: Does each employee have equal access to support?  How can this access improve?

at-work-global-outlook.html">Deloitte Women @ Work 2022 Survey

Emma Codd

Making a career change is important because outside of sleep, work is where we spend the greatest number of hours over our lifetime. Work plays a huge role in shaping our identities, relationships and sense of belonging.

On today’s podcast we are joined by Sarah Wittman, Assistant Professor of Management at George Mason University’s School of Business, who has conducted research into how work shapes our identity. In her article for Harvard Business Review she shares how thanks to major shifts in the labor market, workers are switching organizations, functions, and even industries much more frequently than past generations. Consequently, our sense of self at work is constantly changing too.

We do tend to be on these career treadmills. What can I get? What's the next position? All of these other things. And even when we're jumping industries, we say, okay, this is a great opportunity for me. I'm going to be increasing maybe my status, my pay etc, maybe my work life balance. But when we really get down to it, I think we need to take into account that identity long angle. Identities, if we want to define them, are these self-definitions; what we use to describe ourselves. This can be personal characteristics, such as, I'm hardworking.  Or it can be role related. I am a professor or relational. I'm also a spouse, I'm a teacher, I'm a mentor. Or when we talk about the gender angle, it can be social identities.  When we think about what comes with us, and this is where lingering identities come in, it's essentially what do we carry with us when we leave one job and enter another?

Managing our work identity is important, especially when you are looking to change jobs or careers.

In addition to using the VME (Value, Meanings and Enactment) framework, Sarah says there are three actions you can take to ensure your success in a new role, company or career path:

Action One:  Understand your current work identity well enough to use it as a filtering device for available opportunities.

Action Two:  Only pursue job opportunities that offer a good enough match for your identity.

Action Three:  Understand how your identity will change in your new role.

Changing careers or jobs can be difficult. To give yourself the best possible chance of success you have to assess if the job will add and enable your sense of self.

Sarah Wittman

George Mason University

Successful women often disregard gender roles, which makes people uncomfortable. For female leaders, managing this is critical. Having people support you determines how well you can build relationships and influence people, in other words, how well you can lead. Leading through backlash can be an incredibly difficult thing to do, as it takes a toll on women’s self-esteem and relationships. Backlash results in people disliking successful women and preferring male leaders. As society doesn’t associate women with power, employees don’t either, which is why it’s acceptable to push back on women leaders and question their legitimacy.

On today’s podcast we are joined again by Dr Michelle Harrison Global CEO of Kantar Public, who is going to be discussing the recently published findings of the fifth and extended edition of The Reykjavík Index for Leadership, which highlights entrenched prejudice towards women leaders.  Launched in 2018, The Reykjavík Index for Leadership measures and tracks progress in society’s perceptions of women and men’s suitability to lead across 23 economic sectors. Together with Women Political Leaders, Michelle and her company conducted this groundbreaking research, and together we will unpack why societal attitudes have stalled when it comes to women in leadership positions.

If we take the five year view, there's been no improvement, but there was a period when things looked like they were, and then there's been a quite a sharp reversal.  Let’s think about those two particular measures. We ask people, and it's a percentage, do they feel very comfortable with the idea of a female CEO of a large corporation. And we also asked the same question about a Head of State. The data on female CEOs for the G7 group go back five years and it was 46% of the population who felt very comfortable. So the majority of people, in the G7 group of countries are not feeling entirely comfortable with the idea of a woman being in charge of a country or a large organization.

To create workplaces that work for everyone we need to understand how they are broken. Here Michele shares specific actions we can take to tackle gender inequality:

Action One: Keep striving for change: we do need to just keep going. We have to create workplaces where people are rewarded fairly and with as much inclusivity as possible, this will benefit us all.

Action Two: Stop trying to fix women, we don't need to fix women. The issues are about the way organizations, companies, and societies work. All of our work about inclusivity and diversity is for everyone and moving sharply away from the idea that we're trying to help women deal with these issues.

Action Three: Keep calling people out.  We all need to take a stronger view about all of the actions, behaviors and microaggressions that women and other groups experience every day in the workplace. We need to put the onus on correcting the people who do these things and not on the people who previously we might have been training to better manage being on the receiving end of that.

Dr Michelle Harrison

Kantar Public

Our expectations of leadership are masculine, when we evaluate men’s potential, we are much more likely to see them as a good fit. Women do not meet our masculine expectations, therefore the projection is never triggered.

This male bias in our cognitive processing of leadership potential is powerful. “Think manager, think male” means we can fail to see women’s leadership potential. In fact, research suggests that men and women behave very similarly in senior roles, but men routinely receive higher leadership ratings.

On today’s podcast, Lisa S. Kaplowitz, Executive Director at Rutgers Center for Women in Business will be joining us to discuss the harmful ways women have to change themselves to fit the ideal worker image, and organizations that devalue anyone who differs from it. In an article for Harvard Business Review entitled, 5 Harmful Ways Women Feel They Must Adapt in Corporate America Lisa and two co-authors share findings from their research, Lisa outlines what these adaptations are and why they are ultimately harmful.

She also leaves us with some actions to implement into our workplaces in order to bridge the gap in the devaluing of difference:

Action One: Be aware – Know what an ideal worker looks like when they show up in your workplace.

Action Two: Ask – Do not assume.  Ask an employee how you can support them, what additional resources they might need and what help they may need to advance in their career or to get a project to completion.

Action Three: Ensure interactions are authentic, genuine and informal conversations.

Action Four: Give feedback.  Honest feedback, without sugar coating.  Allow feedback to be a conversation where all can have their say.

Rutgers Center for Women in Business

Lisa S Kaplowitz

Today is a special episode, we are going to unpack how to make a career change. Whether that is starting a new job or building your own business, at some point most of us will want to make a change, the problem is it can often feel overwhelming when you do. However, you might be surprised to learn just how many of us experience career changes on a regular basis.

According to the latest findings from the Pew Research Center approximately 53% of employed U.S. adults quit their jobs in 2021 and changed their occupation or field of work at some point last year. Additionally, Research by the online career platform, Zippia finds that in the United States, 37% of the labor force changed or lost their job in 2020. 

The average American worker has 12 jobs throughout a lifetime and an average tenure of about 4.1 years. Learning to manage your career is a critical skill.

On today’s podcast, Dorie Clark, author, consultant and keynote speaker will be joining us to discuss how you can make a career change and find meaning at work.

While most of us can identify a meaningful goal we want to pursue, there isn’t always an equal opportunity to realize these ambitions. Men and women do not have the same access to purse their passions, hobbies and interests outside of work. In the United Kingdom the office for National Statistics data has found that men spend an average of four hours and 39 minutes every week on hobbies, computing and games. In comparison, women spend just two hours and 38 minutes on the same activities. Men were found to spend more of their hours on leisure time than women in almost every category, including watching TV, hobbies and eating out.

When not in leisure, women were more likely to be performing unpaid work. This may include dependent care and housework.

In order to reach a point of fulfilment Dorie leaves us with some actions from the podcast.

Action 1:  Avoid burnout – Get to know yourself, understand how your body feels, don’t get to the point of burnout as the recovery is long.

Action 2: Don’t fight reality – Push yourself when necessary but know when to stop, this is not sustainable.

Action 3: Take the survey – If you answered no to at least half of these questions, you may not feel as engaged or fulfilled in your current role.  Something may need to change.

Dorie Clark

Dorie Clark - LinkedIn

Joining us on today’s episode is Lily Zheng author of DEI Deconstructed and a sought-after diversity, equity, and inclusion speaker, strategist, and organizational consultant who specializes in hands-on systemic change to turn positive DEI intentions into positive DEI outcomes for workplaces and everyone in them.

Why do DEI efforts fail, is a question asked by many leaders. Why is it that companies claim to be invested in advancing DEI, launching one initiative after another, yet research finds at any one point in time roughly 50% of us feel isolated, excluded, devalued and disengaged at work?

There are three reasons why DEI efforts fail, these include fatigue, backlash and denial. When DEI efforts, don’t address the root cause of inequality people become tired with all the lip service. This fatigue leads to backlash as people resist effort and initiatives that aim to address discrimination and inequality at work. And when resistance isn’t enough, people may resort to denying that inequality exists at all, examples of this include managers simply not believing inequality is a problem in their workplace.

Lily explains that it’s not that people are tired of doing DEI work, it's that they're tired of doing DEI work that doesn't achieve anything. To address that kind of fatigue we need to be rethinking all of our in initiatives, potentially even doing less, but making sure that we can directly tie every single thing we're doing into the outcomes we're trying to create.

Fatigue backlash and denial create the DEI death spiral because it leaves people feeling powerless to affect change. There is nothing I can do to change my workplace, but this simply isn’t true Lily gives us these actions to take away.

Action One: Get to know the difference between the types of power; formal, reward, coercive and expert power.  Know that everyone within an organization has power, you just have to know how to use it.

Action Two: Be strategic in how you use your power and think of your connections within an organization to use your unique power as a tool to make change.  Back this up with expert ideas to aid change to take place.

Action Three: Organizing is really powerful. You can organize as part of an employee resource group. You can organize as part of a DEI council or committee, you can organize to encourage and highlight the workforces strengths. All of these are really powerful.   Manifestations of collective power, collective organizing, collective advocacy. They’re all tools that all employees have at their disposal to make change within workplaces

Lily Zheng

Dei Deconstructed: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Doing the Work and Doing It Right