B Lab Forces For Good Podcast — Episode 5: Workplace belonging: perk or priority?

Without diversity, companies struggle to hire. Without inclusion, employees leave. Without equity, entire groups are shut out.

And when businesses fail to invest in their people, everyone loses.

In the latest episode of Forces For Good, we explore what it really takes to build an inclusive workplace. Sarah White, COO and Co-Founder of B Corp Fairware, shares how her company is rethinking hiring and benefits to create real opportunities for all employees. And Tom Strong of the National Fund for Workforce Solutions explains why the outdated worker-employer “social contract” no longer works—and what we need to replace it.

Listen now to explore:

• How traditional workplace models leave too many people behind

• Why diversity, equity, and inclusion are business imperatives—not buzzwords

• What companies can do to foster belonging and retain talent

• How rethinking hiring, pay, and benefits leads to long-term success

Listen to Forces For Good and discover how to build a workplace where everyone belongs: https://lnk.to/B-Lab-Forces-For-Good-Workplace-Belonging

TRANSCRIPT: Season 3 — Episode 5: Workplace belonging: perk or priority?  This is Forces for Good, a podcast from B Lab, the nonprofit network powering the global B Corp movement. I’m your host Irving Chan-Gomez.

Forces for Good takes a hard look at how businesses are helping to solve the biggest social and environmental challenges of our time. 

We're excited to be back with season 3 to dive deep into what makes a good job. 

Imagine going to work each day where being different makes things better.  Each of your unique qualities are celebrated and accepted. This is what makes a good job, and is actually a reality—for some.

Now, imagine going to work each day, feeling like your differences are criticized. Everything that makes you who you are, is seen as something to be feared, ignored or less than. Unfortunately, this is also someone’s reality - causing an extreme disconnect.

Luckily, many workplaces are finding that creating a welcoming environment for all can foster connection and opportunity. One business that takes this seriously is B Corp, Fairware; they create marketing campaigns and merchandise for some of your favorite companies from Ben and Jerry’s to Patagonia.

Ever seen your pint of Chunky Monkey or Cherry Garcia with a call to action on it? That might have been FairWare! But long before CEO Sarah White began Fairware in her garage, she was working to drive change in other ways. 

Sarah: I think being a queer woman, but also, my background is also in kind of social justice and activism, and I was involved in a lot of community projects and the feminist movement in the eighties.

And so all of those really are so much a part of how I operate and how I've always wanted to build a business. You know, it's almost. It's almost as though those values always come with wherever I would be. So, even if it wasn't fair wear, it's like fair was the vehicle for these things for me, sustainability, social justice, all of those things. 

Social justice has a lot to do with today's episode. It's all about creating equal opportunities and fair treatment for everyone. Regardless of race, gender, class, the list goes on. 

Replacement: This is what we mean when we talk about justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. It's a business imperative that allows anyone the opportunity to have a good job. Unfortunately, outdated ideas of what success looks like can get in the way. Ideas like...seeing success like it's a piece of pie.

Tom Strong: There's a pie, and only get so much of it, and so you have to fight over what's in there. Why does the pie only have to be so big? Our perspective is, what if you can grow the pie by investing in the right parts of the community.

That’s Tom Strong, Director of Employer Activation at the National Fund for Workforce Solutions. This idea of limited pie can actually be resolved through intentional diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. But what do those words actually mean? 

People sometimes mistake equity for equality. But there is a difference. Let's break it down.

Tom: You go back and look at the history of the term equity, four or five hundred years ago, it evolved from terms having to do with equality, but also with rights. Especially, it really developed around the rights that people have in shared joint enterprises or in their communities. And that became the basis for how we understand equity as ownership in a company now, that you have rights when it comes to the wealth that this company creates. 

We know that it would be a huge problem if stockholders were denied rights based on their economic background, or their race, or their education, but when we look at workplaces, if people are not getting advanced because of those reasons, and not because of their skills or qualifications, that is not understood in the same way. And I think a lot of how we approach equity at the National Fund is making sure that you are invested in this place and this place should be investing in you at the same time.

Investing in the people that work for you is something that Sarah makes an intentional point of doing. Because of our invisible and visible differences, we need to put in more of an effort to get to know the people we work with. 

For example, socioeconomic status affects every workplace, but it's not always obvious what those differences are, like race or visible disabilities. It's also not something people are always comfortable speaking about openly. 

Sarah looks for clues in conversation to help spot where differences may be. Being mindful of what is said is good for business, and also checking our bias.

Sarah: I teach people what to look at when people talk about their hobbies and things, how those can be indicators of class and where they come from, and how to check our bias around all this.

Oh, I relate to this person because I also ski or something and how that can get in the way of valuing another perfectly qualified candidate that we may not know about or understand as much. So it is extended health benefits and understanding that that's actually a part of financial wellness and profit sharing. Things like that, having those benefits and having extra days off and care days and flexibility to work at home yesterday.

One of our employees went off to watch her kid in a cross country race. Those are critical for women, for parents, we do a lot of accommodations for people with disability and invisible disabilities who need different kinds of work environments and, especially when you get into thinking about marginalized folks, if it's people of color or queers, or women and all of those kinds of practices and policies or help are keeping those people and allowing them to actually be employed.Whereas they may not in a traditional workplace. 

Sarah's right. Traditional workplace models are becoming outdated. In many countries, there is a social contract that no longer fits the current makeup of the population. Sticking to the old ways is causing a ripple effect of inequities. But first, what exactly is this social contract?

Tom: In the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, we went through a period where there was a pretty widespread agreement that there was a social contract that needed to exist between workers and businesses. And the way they put it then is what is good for Wall Street also needs to be good for Main Street. And that’s the social contract. But it's definitely frayed over time. It's not the same now as it used to be back then. There isn't the same expectation of loyalty in either direction. And there's more cynicism in both directions. But we definitely see examples of companies that do invest in their workers and thrive.

“What’s good for Wall Street needs to be good for main street” means businesses need to take into consideration the whole population, not just a small privileged portion of it. At Fairware, Sarah has policies that break down barriers to work and provide equal opportunity for all people. Their job postings don't demand unreasonable years of experience or elaborate certifications. This lets aspiring workers know that they are valuable to the company, even if they haven't had the privilege of getting a degree. And it doesn't stop there. 

Sarah makes sure she stays educated on how to be truly inclusive. 

Sarah: I'm a part of this group called the president's group, and it's a group that is working towards increasing employment for people with disabilities in our province, and one thing we all do together is called a pledge to measure.

So we do a session with our teams where we talk about what is disability and especially invisible disability. Mental health pain, you know, all of these kinds of things that are often not recognized and then we survey our team and then we, as a group, we publicly declare that to the rest of the province to try and decrease stigma around disability.

So there's so many things that kind of weave into the fabric, I think. Having people feel like they belong, they can advocate for themselves for what they need.

So what can companies do to check if their workplaces are working for their employees? Tom says, it starts with getting a little creative.

Tom: You can think about quality in kind of a job or a workplace the same way you would think about it in terms of how you design products or how you design services, which is to say that employers can be creative and entrepreneurial about how they create and improve jobs over time. 

Let's go back to the drawing board. The way employers can create and improve jobs is not just a temporary program or short term initiative. But an authentic effort to make sure all feel welcomed where they work. 

Tom: The program I lead, the Activate Employers to Make Jobs Better solution, we focus on making workplaces themselves more equitable. So that people have real opportunities to advance in their careers, that they feel that their own jobs, whether or not the advancements are getting better, and that their workplaces, both understand them and know how to create the most value together. 

Part of what we're trying to get people to understand is that, workers are closer to the problems of the workplace in many ways than the the management team are, maybe, and if you can understand the problems that workers see, you can both help them address kind of challenges that they are experiencing, as well as maybe solve problems of the work that's limiting the workplace in some way.

Tom walked us through what this looks like in practice, with a construction company based in Wichita, Kansas. 

Tom: They were a pretty solid employer, but there were a lot of factors going on. And so they chose a really interesting approach. First they developed a design team that included both people who are managers and frontline workers in the company. And then that design team interviewed workers about what kinds of things were affecting their desire to stay with the company for a long time and their commitment to the company and what they heard is that there was basically the front line workers saw the supervisors, the four men in the company, it's just needing more understanding of how to manage people.

They needed some supervisory training and preparation. And so the company invested in a form of training program that they ran in three cohorts. What they found from running it is that the intention turnover of people to leave their job dropped by a significant amount and the commitment to the organization, which is when people say this organization's problems are my problems too, increased significantly.

So that's an example of how we both do human centered design work and the kind of outcomes that can have.

Creating good jobs starts with a simple gesture: ask your employees what they need. Tom shared another success story, about what happens once you ask this question. 

Tom: A company I did work with as a consultant years ago, they employed a lot of contingent temporary workers. Turnover among this group of workers was quite high. It included a lot of people who were considerably lower income and generally more racially diverse than the people who were long term workers at this company. They asked us to interview workers and try to understand what was going on there.

What we found is that people had a lot of challenges with transportation. Their access to cars was not as great as it could have been, they had other jobs that made it difficult to get there on time. Even if they had a car, they had childcare responsibilities. They often had no money and so they couldn't pay someone to do it for them. So these kinds of barriers to work, these are really big social problems and they were not well understood by the company. The company gained a new understanding of it and started to think more about how we can support people, especially earlier in their career, to keep them here.

And they did some things. They increased wages for their temporary workers. They also created a new position for early to mid stage frontline workers that was kind of a team mentor, who would be in charge of onboarding new workers and helping them understand their career advancement opportunities in the company.

Diversity, equity and inclusion creates opportunities for underrepresented groups. Once we understand the barriers, we can design ways to address them… So what are the steps we can take to increase worker's access, wellness, and sense of belonging? 

Tom: So first, develop a system for listening to your employees that is pretty robust and is tied to your own continuous improvement practices and policies. We see job quality and workplace quality as a journey, right? It's not something you get to immediately and you can treat it as you would any other continuous improvement practice, but you do need to listen to your workers and try to bring them into being problem solvers with you in order to do that.

Second, about the workforce development partners in your region that you might be able to work with on this stuff. One thing about businesses is because they're so busy, a lot of them don't even know that there is workforce development, like resources, agencies, nonprofits that they could partner with to help address some of these big problems. I think there's more need for kind of mindful partnerships between the workforce development sector and communities of businesses like the B Corporation community.

Because I think there's a lot more potential for us to work together than we've seen so far. And a third piece of advice is kind of figure out which problems you can solve yourself, but the ones you can't, don't give up there. You can, especially if you work with our members or organizations like us, you can work with your industry peers on these kinds of big intractable problems and really make progress on them over time. But you just need to recognize that it's not always going to be a go alone approach that's going to make these things happen for you.

Sarah: I think we need to use our businesses as forces of change and we need to start from the inside. I don't separate the personal from the political from the business from any of it. I don't think I'm in this world to go home and do something different than I do at my job, and I think that's what's brilliant about the B Corp movement. It's really publicly stating that we need to use our voices to drive change, and not just inside our businesses, but on public policy and on signing petitions and talking to politicians. We need to keep doing those things, because collectively we have impact.

Unfortunately, around the world there are a lot of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives being pulled back. 

Without diversity, there’s fewer prospective employees to hire, and nobody around to do the work. 

Without inclusion, people are more likely to quit because they don’t feel any sense of belonging. 

Without equity, there are unfair policies that stand in the way of everyone getting access and opportunity. 

This is not good for business. And it’s not good for society at large.

If you’d like to learn more about B Corps and purpose-driven companies, visit BCorporation.net. Subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Your support helps Forces for Good reach new audiences.

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The views and opinions expressed are those of the interviewees and do not reflect the positions or opinions of the producers or any affiliated organizations.

This podcast was brought to you by B Lab in partnership with The Gates Foundation. Special thanks to Sherri Jordan for coordination. Forces For Good is produced by Hueman Group Media.

I’m your host, Irving Chan-Gomez. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!