How to keep diversity top of the agenda when it’s out of the news | LIVE

Sam.

Well, hello and welcome to the shortlist. It is Wednesday 17th February as we're recording this and for myself in the northwestern part of Europe, it's becoming springtime. We're starting to see the signs of spring. It's getting brighter. But but again, if today you're waking up in Texas, you're looking at absolutely arctic conditions and freezing cold. So maybe you're not so optimistic about spring as we are here in Dublin where we're recording the show. But you're very welcome. We've got a great show planned. We've got two fantastic guests joining us today to spark a conversation, hopefully get some of you who are listening perhaps live to join in with your comments and questions. We, as always, would love to hear from you. For those of you listen to as a podcast recording, you're very welcome. We'll have any links that we discuss here shared in the show notes those listening on podcast don't forget this is a live show that does broadcast. If you'd like to join every Wednesday at 4pm UK time on YouTube and also on LinkedIn on my profile. Johnny Campbell I am the CEO and co founder of Social Talent. If you want to find me, you can dig into LinkedIn and find me. For those of you watching live, you can listen to this as a podcast. You'll find it on Spotify, Apple or where you find your good podcasts. And if you'd like to find out a list of our upcoming shows, our previous shows, or anything else about the shortlist, you can do so@socialtalent.com the shortlist so let's get into the show. So this week what I want to talk about is exploring diversity, equity and inclusion, and particularly talking about how do you keep this top of the agenda when it's out of the news, like we're recording this in 2021, 2020, we've run several shows. It was top of mind for a lot of people. But then organizations go into a new cycle of strategy and planning and we start a new year. If you're running the fiscal year the same as the calendar year, and maybe it isn't as high in the agenda, or maybe it is, but you feel that in your organization it isn't quite been given the focus it was perhaps in the second half of last year, I think we'll all agree it's rightly moved from a nice to have for certain organizations to an intrinsic necessity for every organization to be able to attract talent, retain their talent, and attract and retain customers critically. But it makes for better workplaces, it makes for better bottom lines. We all understand both the business case and the ethical case for it. But sometimes it feels like it takes an atrocity like we had last summer for diversity to be fully highlighted. And to talk about that, we thought we'd invite two people to join us from a firm who have been working on this for quite a long time. I know it's an organization I've admired from afar as to how they've been dealing with these topics, often quite ahead of their peers and ahead of many organizations around the world. That organization is eye. And joining us from the UK Ireland business in EY today, we have Catalina Hernandez, who is the Assistant Director of Diversity and inclusiveness. And we have Matthew Jeffrey, who is the talent attraction and Acquisition director for UKIE at ey. Catalina and Matt, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having us.

Thanks for joining us to join you.

Well, I was wondering maybe starting with Catalina, you could tell us a little bit about yourself, your role, maybe just some background in terms of your history, how you ended up with working in this space and working with ey. And then Matt, I'll ask you the same question.

Sure. So personally, I was born and raised in Colombia in South America in a really small town. And I immigrated to the US When I was little. And throughout my younger years I thought I wanted to be an attorney. And after graduating from university, I realized I didn't want to do that and I went into recruitment and that's where my career started. And through recruitment I, I started experiencing the common workplace microaggressions. Things were said about my background. The way we spoke about diverse candidates and hiring for diversity just felt really problematic to me. And I started speaking up more and talking about diversity in the way that we recruited. And that's really where I saw my passion. And so I started my career in recruitment, but slowly and surely started focusing on diversity more and more. And I moved to the UK last summer and, or actually summer 2019 and started focusing on it completely. And so I started at EY as the diversity recruitment lead for experienced hire recruitment and have since transitioned to a role on our central DNI team, focusing on all of our efforts and how we support our business through this journey that we're on ultimately. And that's how I met Matthew.

Excellent. I won't go into how I met Matthew. That's going to be a much longer conversation. But Matthew, maybe tell us a little bit your journey and how you managed to join ey.

Yeah, my sort of journey is that after Coming from agency background, I moved into Electronic Arts, a video games company, spent eight years there, head of studio recruitment for emea, and then became their global employment director, one of the first sort of roles that encompassed employment brand many years ago. I then spent two years at Autodesk heading up AMEA and global employment brand for them. And. And in the last seven years, I've been SAP again, working with the employment brand team and the global sourcing team. So great. Seven years there. So now at EY and focused on UKI and yeah, working with Catalina to try and make a difference in diversity and really take some bold initiatives to get us ahead of the pack.

So we can tell a lot these days on a zoom call, our broadcast from a person's room, we can see Matt's surrounded by football memorabilia and wearing his Man United shirts. Catalina, you've got your treadmill and your peloton in the background. And just before we went live, I was giving out to you for not having left your home for four weeks. That's a whole other discussion about mental health and everything else we need to get you out. But I probably don't advise you visiting that room full of football memorabilia that Matt is in. As many of you may know, I'm not a sports person that really follow any football teams, but I do see the symbol in the back hanging on your door mat, which makes me very proud. And, you know, I don't know if either of you know this series of books. I think it's little people, big ideas. There's a series of books they're originally created for kids, you know, the math. And the original kind of 30 titles were all kind of more brilliant. Female leaders and artists and poets and scientists, and they've slowly maturely expanded and let some male kind of representatives in there. But the big, big focus was trying to teach kids about female leaders. And now it's kind of just, you know, a broader, broader sense of, of different, different artists. But this year they added a brand new artist to their title and that was Prince. So I bought the Prince book to add to our collection for my kids. And we've been playing Prince a lot in our house these days. Matt, I'm proud of you.

I have that book as well.

Oh, it's awesome. It's awesome. Anyway, that aside, as we do on the show every week, what I want to do is start with just jumping into some kind of topical live news articles. I'm going to ask Niall in the back room to start us off with our first news item this week. First piece of news has come from People Management. It's published in the UK by an author called Remy Baker, who is herself managing director of a firm that work with organizations around culture and diversity, diversity and inclusion. And it, it's titled it's up to Businesses to Keep the BLM Movement Alive. And obviously referring to Black Lives Matter and the movement that was kicked off last summer with the unlawful killing of George Floyd. And this is kind of a. It's a ratty cry that goes into then what Remy describes as kind of three core points or three ways to keep. Keep the movement alive. Want to get your opinion both on, on this article. You know, do you feel, first of all, do you agree it's up to businesses to keep this alive? And second of all, you know, what are your thoughts on Remy's points and methods to do this?

Yeah, I would agree. And I think, you know, it's not just up to businesses, it's up to all of us to keep the messages alive. And, you know, I remember back to the atrocity with George Floyd last year, and the impact on the business was absolutely. It just went like a shockwave through the business, you know, speaking to colleagues on the team, colleagues who went very quiet and they really felt what had happened and the impact of that death. And it was again, talking and listening and it was just amazing. The sense that we needed to do something as a company and, you know, as we look at things today is, I always say to our team, it shouldn't take an atrocity to keep things alive. We need to live diversity 24, 7. And we're doing this for the next 2, 3, 4, 5 years to bring in and make the company more inclusive, to bring in that sense of belonging. So I think, you know, as a leader of the recruitment function in UKI recruitment, you know, I feel it very personally that our team can make a massive difference to the company in who we seek to attract and how we make people belong to the culture we have. So, absolutely, the whole team shares this commitment and we're not waiting for the next atrocity to come up, which will come up. We are continuing to live and breathe this and we want to show the results that we have as we go along. So, Catalina, I know you share this passion and you live this daily as well.

Yeah, definitely, Matthew. And I think in reading the article, the author highlights these three specific points around. You shouldn't shrink away from conversations and you should be intentional about educating yourself and treating diversity and inclusion as an imperative. And I think both of all of Those points are incredibly important. But what I think is missing when sometimes people read these articles is they, they say they absorb that and they're like, oh, okay, yeah, I care. And, but then what's, what's next? And I think that's the most important part is you can't just read this thousand word article and assume that you've done enough, that you've done the reading. The educating yourself comes in many different ways. It often comes from being told that you're wrong and from making a mistake and saying the wrong thing. And so I think articles like this are important for starting a conversation, but it shouldn't be the only thing that somebody consumes a word I want to.

Pick on that you use there is intentional or intentionality. Kathleen reminds me, and I've used this quote before, comes from a friend of mine, Joe Gerson, who I admire his work and the way he speaks around inclusion and diversity, but he likened DNI to exercise. He said, we all agree that being healthy and doing exercise is the right thing to do. We all agree that we should keep fit and we should be out there and you know, eating well. He said, but agreeing with it and, you know, supporting it doesn't make you fit. You know, to get fit, you got to get on the treadmill, you got to pound the pavement, you got to do the miles. You actually have to put the effort in. As soon as you stop, you know, you stop being fit. And that, that's, you know, I love, always love that analogy around this topic because it does require daily or weekly activities, intentional activities to actually keep this momentum up. It isn't enough to agree, it isn't enough to be aware. It does require action. And I think it's probably just fair to say that after you have such a big event as last summer, there is in human nature, you're going to have this apathy as we settle back into maybe what people consider to be a more normal world where there hasn't been a big headline. It's kind of normal for people to just revert backwards, isn't it? And if so, how do you basically try and force them to not slack off on the exercise, so to speak?

Yeah, whoever said that is a person after my own heart. Because I was in a meeting yesterday where I used basically the exact same analogy and I said it's a muscle and it needs be to, to be exercised. And I don't know, Matthew and Johnny, if during the height of this past summer everyone was talking about all the anti racism books that you need to read. And everyone was picking up books and buying them and doing all the things. And the other day my husband and I were reading before bed and he turned to me and he's like, oh, what are you reading? And I'm reading an anti racism book called Mediocre. And he was like, oh, I thought you'd kind of done that. And I said, no, it kind of needs to continue. It wasn't just in July when I'm reading the books, I need to do it now. And sometimes I'll pick up a podcast or listen to an audiobook or something. It has to continue. And to your point, Johnny, it's a muscle that needs to be exercised.

I'm going to jump to our second article. I think this is a nice continuation of the conversation. This comes from Forbes, and this is a really interesting survey and it's an inside look at the sentiment of black and brown professionals in corporate America. So if you haven't checked out the article, it's on Forbes, it's called Exclusive Survey, An Inside look at the Sentiment of Black and Brown Professionals in Corporate America. And Forbes described this as their inaugural survey that they're hopefully going to run this regularly. But you know, unfortunately, unsurprisingly, it doesn't make for comfortable reading. You know, it's a really important read because it highlights the, the, the real reality of the situation. For I think it's 750 surveyed individuals who self describe as black and brown and corporate America. You know, were either of you surprised at the numbers and the stats here? And I'll call out some of them. 55% say employers are not transparent about DEI progress. 63%, it's nearly 2/3 saying they're not being given the same opportunities. Of white employees, 36% not comfortable bringing authentic self to work. Example given of two women who were interviewed saying they were comfortable wearing their hair and their more natural cultural style because they felt it highlighted their cultural difference. Do these stats surprise you, either of you?

No, not at all. Sorry, Catalina.

No, no, no, I agree with you, Matthew. I think it's reading the article like I've lived it, right? I've been on the receiving end, especially when I lived in the US and the Latin American community is seen as a very isolated minority. There's a lot of, a lot of microaggressions that get thrown your way, and I've experienced it. But I also very much recognize that I'm a beneficiary of white privilege. So I've also been in rooms where problematic things have been said about black colleagues or about the concept of diversity and inclusion in general. And hearing that, I have no doubts that this is happening and that these experiences captured in this survey are only just a tiny snapshot of what's being experienced in most corporate environments.

Yeah, and I think, Johnny, what we found last year at EY is we have something called a Wren network, Race Ethnicity Network. And we had a number of company calls in the uk, we invited leadership on and black colleagues came on and described their experiences and they were very emotional, very powerful experiences, you know, life at work, but also life out, you know, in everyday life as well. Talking about experiences of racism, microaggressions, etc. I think it really shook the company and it shook the leadership because when you really get into these stories and hear what's happening and what's happening in life and how people are feeling, it then gives you that agenda. We must do something, we must make a difference. And I think the key thing that we've been trying to do at EY is to listen and to learn and to self reflect and see what we can do. And you know, I've benefited obviously from white privilege, but now I'm in the role that I want to make a difference and I'm really listening. And it's great to work for EY that is working on a host of initiatives that we can, you know, share with the viewers as we go through. But I think the key bit of advice is for any company is listen to your employees, listen to the experience that they've been going through. And I think that when you start to listen, that gives you the agenda for, for change and we're supporting them. And it's fascinating seeing that, you know, how we have these sessions last year and we continue to have them now and anti racism workshops, etc. And you know, colleagues reaching out to support and to listen, to make a difference. So, you know, that's a key bit of advice today is just is listen and learn and then, you know, make a change agenda based on that.

So the last decade as I've been following EY UK, Ireland, because again, I just want to call out EY whilst it has 300,000 employees, I think worldwide, it's a member firm where it isn't like a traditional corporate hierarchy where you'd have CEO or board and you make decisions around the world, you've got partners in different parts of the world and it's much more consensus. I compared Switzerland to the uk. You have to technically these are semi autonomous states if you like. Who can do their own thing, but they agree to cooperate. So it's quite a unique organization. And I know, my understanding is obviously not everything works this exact same way. There's obviously global guidance.

Yeah, definitely. I think, Johnny, you're frozen there, but I can take the gist of what you were saying. And I think when we talk about ey, I think the key thing to say is that particularly for us in the focus of uki, we're on a journey. We're not going to sit on this call today and Catalina and I say we're the benchmark, we're the best practice. We're actually just going to sit and say we're very much learning, we're on a journey. We've set out a series of measures and our goal is to improve and to become much more diverse as a company over the next two, three, four, five years and not stop. I mean, Catalina, there's a number of initiatives we could take people through. I don't know if you want to, to do that.

Yeah, well, and I think, Matthew, to speak a little bit to that and to Johnny's point around us being a global organization but also being very UK centric, I think when the events of last summer happened and the unfortunate murder of George Floyd caused this global conversation, there was a tension in the UK firm. And Matthew, tell me if I'm wrong but around does this apply to us? And everyone was a little bit nervous and it was to your point, around the listening and hearing and our black colleagues saying, yes, this does apply, we are hurting. This feels close to home. I know I watched a video and was shocked and I felt for my friends in the US And I immediately went online and started doing research around how relevant is this to my role here in the uk If I'm honest, I didn't have any friends here that I could ask or really any close colleagues at that point because I was relatively new to the organization and, and that listening and actually taking a moment to reflect and say this global conversation does apply to us and what do we need to do was really important. And so as a result, to speak to your point about initiatives, we released in July our seven anti racism commitments around the key things that we're going to do to tackle anti racism within the firm. And not saying that that's the end all be all, but it's definitely a start. And maybe perhaps, Matthew, we can, we can look at some of those anti racism commitments that, that we made. I think that one of the big ones that we made is to Train our population on race fluency and allyship. That's a big one. We actually just launched a big race fluency training module that's being rolled out across the firm that all of our people are completing to really understand what does a microaggression mean. I actually found that when I first joined the firm and I spoke to some of our recruiters, Matthew. I spoke about microaggressions, and someone stopped me and said, I don't actually know what that means. I've heard the term before. And, you know, that was a bit shocking to me. But you say, okay, well, this is an opportunity to educate. And so that's what we've been doing as a firm, and we're certainly using this as an opportunity to also speak about allyship, because anti racism is about dismantling systems of oppression. And that applies to other aspects of identity as well. It applies to ableism, it applies to sexuality, it applies to gender. And so those are all things that we're focused on in addition to our focus on anti racism.

Yeah, I agree. And I think what we've probably found hardest of all is, as we go out to. Hi, Johnny. Good to see you back. What we found hardest of all, Johnny, is this is such a difficult area for people to feel free to speak. So when we have team meetings, we talk about microaggressions and anti racism. They're very well received. And I think the difficulty is that there's a nervousness of people saying their opinion because they don't want to say the wrong thing. They want to, you know, be part of what's happening. But there's that fear to really say something. And that's something that we're trying to create, that safe space that people feel free to, you know, offer up their opinions and their experiences and what we can do to help. But we recognize that it's a very, very difficult subject for. For people to speak out of at the moment.

I'm gonna jump in, if you don't mind, because I had to, unfortunately, get cut off for four or five minutes due to a power outage in the home.

We kept you going. Oh, no, he's. He might have gone again.

Oh.

Oh, he's going to get. So, yeah, Catalina, that's very much a real experience for us, isn't it, in terms of people creating those open spaces and feeling free to speak out?

Yeah. And I think we saw it, Matthew, over the course of the summer as we were having some of these dialogues. People slowly getting more and more comfortable with having the conversation it doesn't happen overnight. It takes a little while. And it also takes leadership. Like yours, for example, where you've said this is a priority. We, we are going to speak about it. And you've shown up to all of the conversations and contributed and asked people questions. And that I think is really important. That top down view from leadership saying this is important and then everyone else from the bottom up saying we care as well, let's meet in the middle and let's work on this together.

Yeah, no, I agree. And for people watching on the podcast and afterwards as well, I think what are our sort of the pillars of our commitments? What are we trying to do? And I think we're trying to create three pillars. And the first is to create that culture of belonging that everybody feels part of the company, there's a safe space and everybody has that sense of belonging. The second is having a differential focus on race and gender. So we're looking to double the proportion of our female partners and have 40% females in place by 2025. July 2025. And again, we're looking to desegregate the term Bain down, but just as a generic here we're looking at 20% of our partners being BAME partners by July 2025 as well. And then the third part of those pillars is creating and being a leading and disruptive voice on dni. So making sure our leaders, making them feel accountable and open to talk freely and really empowering their teams and keenly from a recruitment point of view, one of our key areas is to make sure that we bring in a more diverse workforce and flourish and have the right support systems and structures in and training and develop to be able to reach their potential of moving forward. So I think those three pillars are the sort of things that we're focused on at EY and I think with our 80 racism commitments, we could break that down even further, can't we? You know?

Yeah, yeah. And all of the work that we do falls underneath those three different pillars. I see, Matthew, that there was a comment that came through from James that says when discussing diversity, do we need to be more specific and say the actual words like gender, race, neurodiverse, etc. Is the term diversity itself too vague? Do you have any thoughts on that? I know I do, but I'd love.

To hear, you know, you go, you go first.

Well, I think, I think the term diversity is too vague and sometimes we fall into the trap. I know I fall into the trap, but I'm trying to not do it. Is to say things like a diverse candidate. There is no such thing as a diverse candidate. Diversity is a group attribute. And we need to be very specific about what we're trying to do. And we are focusing on our black colleagues, for example, or our Asian colleagues. We have a South Asian community, for example, at eye, and we need to be very specific. And we can't shy away from saying black. And that's not a bad word. It's an aspect of identity that people are proud of and that we should be proud of and that we should embrace. And so I definitely think that companies need to be very specific about what they're doing and to be openly discussing and using terms so that you are targeting the exact thing that you're trying to, to work towards and the exact aspect of identity that you're trying to make more comfortable at your organization. And we certainly have a lot of work to do at EY when it comes to helping out, for example, our non binary colleagues. We've been collecting data on this, but we don't have enough data to really say what initiatives do we need in place to make them feel more comfortable.

Yeah.

At the top of the hour, Catalina, you were saying about asking questions being so important and discussing these yourself as well. Matt and I know that we had a good friend of ours, Sama Awadani, work with us recently on launching Allyship training. And one of the things that she shared with me and our audience when she was on a live event we did a few months ago was that there's a lot of uncomfortableness around language and people don't know what to say or what label somebody wants. What's the right term to use? And her advice was ask somebody. It just starts by having a conversation. You know, it's okay to be ignorant, you know, once, so to speak, but if you, you know, if you find yourself not sure, go ask somebody in a, in a respectful way and you'll get an insight. What is. Of course, don't assume that with that, that that person speaks for everybody that might be of the same color, gender or background. But it's, it's about engaging and about being comfortable to have those conversations. And ask somebody, what are you comfortable with?

What?

You know, does this word make you feel uncomfortable? Should I use that? Should I not? What's your experience? That's how you kind of break down these barriers. I think it's being comfortable to have these conversations.

Yeah, I agree with you. And I think Selma is absolutely a real force in the industry and we turn to her for Advice as well, from an EY perspective. And Catalina and I have had her on calls. I think she's a really tower of good and the advice we're getting from her is magnificent. So if anybody doesn't know her, certainly look her up and reach out to her. I think she's a brilliant force for good in this industry.

I'd love to ask you both a question, if I don't mind me bringing up some history of what I know of EY's recruiting processes and policies. Several years ago I did an interview, but it was in a small pub in London with Dan Richards, who previously held the role you hold today, Matt. And he had shared with our audience how EY in the UK in particular had done something that was quite unexpected and different, particularly for the big four audit firms, which was to change the policy around the way that individuals were hired on the so called milk ground or out of college process. And just to give those from outside the UK a bit more color. You know, it would have typically been somebody with a certain level of degree, 2111 been the equivalent of a GPA high score average in the US or elsewhere. That would have been a cut from certain universities, would have been typically how professional services firms hired. And if you're from that university with that grade, you're in and you can apply for the process. And EY were I think, the first professional service firm that I knew on scale who changed that and opened up the process to a lot more candidates with a very deliberate intention of having individuals from very different backgrounds being able to apply who were excluded. And I know in the early years that was bearing great fruit in the increased diversity even in the first year's cohort that were hired in that group. I wonder if maybe, Matt, you could speak to that process and how it's evolved over the years and maybe Catalina, to perhaps some of the results that the firm has seen in terms of increased diversity amongst different angles across the firm since then.

Yeah, and I think, I mean you hit the nail on the head. We used to be a very Russell group focused, you know, very focused on those core universities going there competing on campus against the rest of the Big four and other companies. And we really wanted to turn that whole process on its head. The best candidate can come from anywhere and we wanted it to be a blind process by blind not knowing where they come from and what their experience was and who they were and putting them into our application methods and through our assessment systems and really seeing who the best people were to come out of that again. You can imagine that we've got people coming from different parts of the uk, different educational backgrounds, different social, economic backgrounds and different cultures, but we're still maintaining quality of the people that we want to see. And when you start getting people from those different backgrounds, you're changing the culture of the company because you're not coming from those set universities and those set individuals that becomes.