When Women Thrive in DC: Facing the Future of Work

For whatever reason, people are surprised – if not shocked – to hear that women make up only 20% of the executive-level workforce of the average participating organization surveyed in Mercer’s 2016 When Women Thrive, Businesses Thrive global research report. But that’s exactly what we learned, and much more, from the 600 organizations (representing some three million employees) who took part in the study.

The urgent need for greater female representation at the leadership level was reason enough to bring people together recently in Washington, DC, for our When Women Thrive conference.  I was honored to meet nearly everyone who gathered to share their views and strategies on the issues of gender diversity, equality, and pay parity, and I hope you were either there or took the chance to view some of the sessions via the Periscope app.

More than a dozen executives from a wide range of organizations held discussions with our consulting leaders, and the energy never flagged. It soared, in fact, thanks in part to our keynote speaker, Candy Crowley, CNN's award-winning chief political correspondent and the host of its Sunday morning talk show “State of the Union.” Candy Crowley represents the sort of achievement that transcends gender, while her dedication to female progress in the workplace is an example to us all.

But, as mentioned in my opening remarks to the conference, our ultimate goal should be to ensure a thriving workforce that is diverse and inclusive of ALL populations – because that is what drives innovation and growth in our companies and advances healthy societies.  We begin with women because of the glaring and persistent gap in workforce participation for half the population of the world.

What our research shows us is that organizations with leaders who are actively engaged in Diversity and Inclusion initiatives have more women at the top.  They also hire, promote and retain women at higher rates relative to men.   But our experience also shows that it is not enough for leaders to mandate change.  They must PERSONALLY drive change through both communication as well as behavior.

That’s a task I’ve set for myself. When I joined Mercer four years ago, I was thrilled to join a team that valued diversity and inclusion to the extent that both Mercer and Marsh & McLennan Companies – our parent company – both do. I saw we had strong participation in what were called back then “Employee Resource Groups.”  These were cultural affinity groups for racial and ethnic diversity, LGBTQ, and women among others. 

I challenged the organization to recast these as “Business Resource Groups,” or BRGs, and called on them to align their passions in these areas to the operating imperatives of our business.  I asked:  How can you leverage this passion to help Mercer Make a Difference in the lives of the 110 million people our work touches?   From that, the Women At Mercer BRG – led by Pat Milligan, Mercer’s  Global Leader for our Multinational Client Group – conceived of When Women Thrive, and it has ignited nothing short of a movement by looking at the issue differently. 

The Washington, DC, conference touched on so many aspects of that movement, and sparked the sort of engagement on social media that is keeping the conversation alive. But the issues raised by When Women Thrive are about more than gender diversity or equality – they address the very future of work in important ways. That was at the core of one of the conference’s key sessions, “The Future of Work,” led by Ilya Bonic, president of Mercer’s talent business, and featuring four diverse leaders:

Christiane Bisanzio, group chief and diversity & inclusion officer, and head of HR for Northern, Central and Eastern Europe for global insurer AXA, spoke about AXA’s women sponsorship program and said that “women are over-mentored and under-sponsored,” and so AXA currently has 20 sponsorship programs globally.

Bisanzio emphasized resilience as a key leadership trait. AXA women in the company’s sponsorship programs receive resilience training, and she noted that 95% of the promotions of women at AXA are women out of the sponsorship program. She expects that one day, many if not all companies will have “Chief Resilience Officers.”

Also on “The Future of Work” panel was Pamela Carlton, co-founder and principal researcher at the Everest Project, a two year exploration of successful women leading change and innovation. “Not only are these women leading change,” she said, “they are leading transformational change in organizations. Women are building cultures of innovation, sustainable ones, and doing it with relational skills that are well known but unseen. I am on a mission to get companies to focus on them.”

Panelist Laura Liswood, Secretary General of the United Nation Fund’s Council of Women World Leaders, observed that “at the macro level, you have the lack of match around what women are doing now and where the jobs are. But my observation is there has often been too much of a focus on what I would call the ‘Noah’s Ark’ approach to diversity. If we could only just get two of each in the ark, we will have our diversity.”

Kevin Lord, senior vice president and CHRO at TEGNA (formerly Gannett Inc.), pointed out that TEGNA owns 46 television stations across the U.S. Women make up much of the viewership in those markets. “We really try hard to recruit talented young women from college campuses and we have been successful,” he said. “Our entry level training program right now is 70 percent women.”

But Lord acknowledged that fact that the higher one goes in organizations, the fewer women are represented in the executive ranks – the 20% problem I mentioned at the beginning of this post.  TEGNA has created a general manager development training program for women. “This program is something that we have found works for us,” Lord said. “We are still fine tuning it for future generations, but we are starting to see some real traction.”

What these leaders -- and all of the leaders who made our DC conference so memorable – recognize is that achieving gender diversity, parity, and equity is part of the much bigger picture, one in which the future of work plays out on a vast global canvas of skills and cultures. Leadership must not only nurture those skills and cultures, it must embody them, and When Women Thrive is helping tomorrow’s workforce do exactly that – today.  Let’s continue the discussion that flourished in Washington! How is your organization addressing diversity, inclusion, and the future of work?

Julio Portalatin