Access is Key to Equity - A Conversation with Bernard Coleman

Bernard is the Chief Diversity and Engagement Officer at Gusto where he leads the Employee Engagement team which encompasses diversity, equity and inclusion, employee relations, and people integrity/governance/compliance functions. Prior to Gusto, Bernard led diversity efforts at Uber, directed Hillary for America’s HR and D&I efforts, and was the first ever Chief Diversity and HR Officer in U.S. history for any presidential campaign. His insights have appeared in Inc, Forbes, The New York Times, TIME, TechCrunch and USA Today.

What does the phrase, "culture eats strategy for lunch” mean to you?

I read a lot of Gallup and Edelman public trust and they have this Trust Barometer which talks about how employees trust companies and organizations more than they trust the government, which I think is interesting. That’s a shift. The government used to be the most trusted institution and now it’s companies. So, you can have a great strategy but if your culture is going to cause people to lose trust or turn potential people away – it can either be an attractor or a repellent. If you think about the experience of looking at a potential organization, you go to the website, you to talk to the people etc. what folks are really trying to ascertain is culture.

When I’m talking to potential candidates at Gusto and asking them why they left their previous organizations, many times it’s between opportunity or culture, with culture sometimes outweighing opportunity because people just fundamentally don’t want to be somewhere where they’re going to have a bad experience. People are not going to organizations where they perceive it might be harmful to their mind, emotions, or bodies.

So, I think organizations need to protect their culture all the time, more-so than they ever have because employees aren’t letting organizations get away with what was happening before the pandemic – and even with a potentially looming recession, its collective demand, culture is going to outstretch that.  

Do you think it’s possible to change an established workplace culture? Why or why not?

It depends on how big a company is. If an organization has like 100k people, I’d say no. For me, trying to change a big company is like dialysis, you can put some good blood in, take some bad blood out, but there is never going to be material progress. So, I think it’s important to establish a culture early on. If not, it can’t get really hard to change overtime. Much like owning a home, you can change the face of it, but if you can’t take it down to the bolts and see what needs to be done and change it or retrofit it, the issues aren’t going to improve.

It's got to start at the beginning, and it has to be in the DNA. I think the only time I’ve ever seen it work after the fact is when organizations have transformational leaders. Those types of individuals that come along and can change a whole organization with their influence, but they don’t come around often. I mostly see them in politics like Obama, where they change the trajectory of everything, but not so much in business.

When it comes to equity in the workplace what do you feel people aren’t thinking about? Is there an example you can share that illustrates this for you?

I think a lot of times people don’t necessarily understand what equity is. I think we talk about and think about what opportunity looks like, but this notion of ‘playing the favorite’ still occurs. I believe it starts with access, and I think a lot of times people don’t realize that there is a lot of gatekeeping and that’s tipping the scales. When people’s ambitions and achievements are being blocked because the same opportunities are not being given to everyone we get predictable success from the same people — it’s tipped in their favor. So, for me it’s a lot about access to opportunity — it’s known, but not fully realized.

What do you think is changing in the workplace that organizations need to start proactively and preemptively thinking about?

I think things need to stop being done in isolation. If you think about the employee journey, one can be really good at recruiting but terrible at onboarding — or great at onboarding and development but terrible at retention. I think with this looming recession, if there is going to be one, it would be advantageous to not just solely look at the sugar high stuff and really narrow in on the full employee lifecycle — look at each piece of the chain and make sure they are all strong and efficient versus doing one thing really really well and expecting it to carry it all. Indexing one experience isn’t necessarily going to offset all the other areas that aren’t performing.

What strategies, tactics, equity and culture solutions have you personally seen work, and why do you think they worked?

One solution that I've seen work really well is relational onboarding, and really trying to think about it as a relationship and not just treating it as a transaction. You're giving people a false bill of goods when expectations don’t align with reality. When there is alignment, it means a lot to people and it is more impactful when it cultivates belonging from the beginning.

A byproduct of the great resignation is that people are more decisive in their choices and demanding of what they expect in the workplace and so I think it’s about being more relationship oriented, making it more intentional versus just about a number.