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[This is Not Your Dad’s Workplace] Diversity & Inclusion Is a Build-In, Not a Bolt-On Requirement

Leave It To Beaver

The much ballyhooed “Talent Wars” are back with a vengeance. Talent is scarce; good talent is really scarce.

Restrictive immigration, baby boomers phasing out of the workforce, an option of flexible work in the gig world, a strong economy for many, and relocation / mobility at an historic low (see Richard Florida’s piece America the Stuckall mean that employers have a smaller pool of talent.  

It’s a buyers, not sellers market, for jobs ranging from the neighborhood pizza place to the C suite.

And this talent pool, long dominated for decades by the baby boomers, has fundamentally changed. Millennials are the now largest generation in the US labor force, and with it come expectations about the workplace that are very different than the boomers.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/04/11/millennials-largest-generation-us-labor-force/

 

Along with other Millennial friendly workplace attributes (career, community, and cause), Millennials want, as Bloomberg reported, “diversity that is more than skin deep.” Many Millennials recognize, appreciate, and encourage diversity because they’re living it. As opposed to older generations that were largely white and straight, today’s dominant workforce segment is divided across a number of races and backgrounds.

Millennials and their friends look like the team at Twitter (see below) at lunchtime. It’s what they know, what they take for granted, and what prospective employers better provide if they expect to attract and retain Millennials.

So along with goodbye to top-down, chain-of-command hierarchical management (Millennials favor autonomy), Millennials expect to see broad diversity at the top and throughout the workplace. Every month is black history month, LGBTQ Pride, etc., not just something trotted out and bannered once a year to show that the workplace is “hip” and supportive.

And the diversity extends to both the obvious (color, ability status, gender, sexual orientation, race, etc.) and the hidden; different schools, different places people grew up, different former employers, and different lifetime experiences.

Earlier this month I had lunch with my colleague Patrician Hansen at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters and the work cafeteria looks like what you might expect if you’re a Millennial – it skews younger (tho’ I saw any number of fellow gray hairs), lots of folks with different colors, accents, straight and LGBTQ+, etc.

In a word, diverse.

The vibe as I toured the public parts of the building more importantly was that folks acted as if they they belonged. No look away gaze, smiles galore, and lots of buzz in the air. And when you look at the exec team bios, folks come from a lot of different backgrounds, not just one place or one company.

Time’s have changed.

In the battle for talent, people have shifted from hoping for diversity, inclusion and belonging in the workplace to expecting it. They have have taken Coco Channel’s advice – “Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door” – to heart. They skip the companies that don’t provide the sort of environment that helps them succeed and thrive.

Employers that have built diversity and inclusion into a sense of belonging as part of their core being – one key factor in attracting and retaining Millennials into their workplace – will do just fine.  

 

I am a San Francisco-based executive, leadership and startup team coach  More about my 30+ years of work in the field can be found at the “About J. Mike Smith and Back West, Inc.” sidebar at the Back West blog.  Now welcoming new and known clients.

 

 

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