Nichole Hoskins, Global Head of People, NeuroLeadership Institute
Neela Rajendra, Chief Inclusion Officer, Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Moderator: Holly Ojalvo, Managing Editor, FORTUNE

MPW Next Gen 2023 - State Of The Workforce 

Conferences

Nichole Hoskins, Global Head of People, NeuroLeadership Institute
Neela Rajendra, Chief Inclusion Officer, Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory

We are going to hear from former I B M, Ceo Jenny Rotti founder, Ceo and Chief investment Officer of a investment management, Kay Wood Only Fan, Ceo Amer Polygon and Pattern Beauty founder and Ceo Tracy Ellis Ross, just to name a few lots more to come. Um Just a very, very quick reminder of our policy. What's said on stage during breakouts is on the record. We do have fortune reporters reporting on these conversations, but whatever is said over one of the breaks on a walk over a drink, um obviously is private unless otherwise agreed upon. Ok, let's get down to business here. According to website layoffs dot F Y I, more than 190,000 tech workers have been laid off in 2023 we are just five months into the year. What does this mean for workplace culture? How are managers supporting teams through all of these uncertainties and scary times? We're thrilled to be joined today by Nila Rajendra, Chief Inclusion Inclusion Officer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Nicole Hoskins Global head of people at the Neuro Leadership Institute. They're going to be interviewed by Fortunes managing editor AVO and we're thrilled to have them start off our day. Good morning. Before we get started. I'm curious about some of you in the audience today. How many of you by a show of hands are actively involved in fostering positive culture as a core part of your job, as part of your job description. It's a lot of people in this room and now I'm curious if we'll have even more people want to ask this question. How many of you do this work organically? Just by gravitating to it. Show of hands that I think that might be all of us to. I don't know if I saw anyone who didn't raise their hand, which is fascinating. So I'm sure you will all have questions for our panelists. So think about those in the back of your mind as we talk and we'll go to audience questions soon. But first, Nicole, I'd love to start with you. Many workers are burned out uncertain, especially in mid layoffs and stressed out the big secret is. So, are managers and leaders? What would you advise your counterparts and other companies to do to foster a positive and trusting work environment, especially amid challenges like layoffs, attrition and slash budgets. Um Thanks for the question. I'm, I'm actually not sure if it's a secret that enough that everybody's feeling a little bit burned out. Um And to that point, I think I would encourage my counterparts to remember how important empathy is um and to be uh leading with empathy thinking about how um teams are feeling stretched. Um How can we be reallocating resources to make sure that they have the support that they need, especially in a time when we are asked to do a little bit more with less, more, do more with less. Um How can we be creative about making sure people have support? Um So that's, that's what I would first recommend. I love that. Yeah, Nela, last year, NASA unveiled a comprehensive D E I plan internal strategy plus a framework for other organizations to use. How have you been executing on this plan at NASA JP L? And what can other organizations learn from what you're doing? Yeah. So uh first of we actually just unveiled it in February. So just a couple of months into the roll out. Um and it's a, a diversity equity inclusion and accessibility plan and that was really intentional. Uh And, you know, the first piece that I would say is really important to making sure that a document like that is a living organism that is adaptable. Um That's not just sitting on a shelf. Um is, you know, there's a lot of ground work that needs to be done in advance of the rollout. So, stakeholder buy in shared visioning, um you know, so making sure all those pieces are in place first, you have the buy in before you roll it out. Second is making it really tangible. So, one of the things that we did at JPL was we created a manager's tool kit that we rolled out at the same time, that was a companion to the strategic plan. And these are evidence based research backed actionable bite size steps that are manageable, that are employable, that align with the strategic plan. What's one example of that? Uh Yeah, so one is um just about uh how do you develop uh a diverse candidate pool? And what are the steps that you need to have to um make sure that you're creating an inclusive and diverse selection panel? Um So it would be one example. Um Another example is around creating cultivating psychological safety. So, um you know, at the top of every meeting, there's really great research from Cathy Phillips around creating, inviting us to be our authentic selves in a way that's inclusive of underrepresented groups. And so being intentional about the questions that you ask to create social connection. Um So, rather than kind of relying on informal dialogue of like, oh, hey, what did everybody do this weekend being a little bit more intentional about the questions that you ask, so that you're inclusive of people who maybe don't feel like they are part of that mainstream culture. That makes so much sense. And that really takes us to the next thing I wanted to ask both of you, which is that there has been a lot of talk about culture and D E I recently. What's something concrete that you've done or seen? This is for both of you that you've done or seen in the past year that actually moved the workplace culture needle and actually made a real difference. Nicole. Uh Yeah, I think um what makes a difference is first establishing sort of a baseline understanding where your organization is um on that the E I journey and not just sort of um introducing interventions or initiatives without understanding exactly where you are, um where there are gap areas and then developing a strategic plan that's going to address those areas. I think that's what's gonna move the needle forward or that's what I've seen, move the needle, um move the needle in what way? Like what's a concrete example of something that's changed? So being able to um embed your commitment to diversity in your systems, your practices, your policies, are we holding people accountable through the way that we evaluate their performance? Are we asking them to demonstrate certain behaviors? And have we explained clearly what those behaviors are? Have we been very um deliberate about explaining how we expect people to behave what our expectations are from an inclusion standpoint? And then um making sure that we're holding people accountable when they don't demonstrate those behaviors. Wow, it is very powerful, Lela Yeah, just to add to that. So we, so in addition to having just rolled out our dia strategic plan. Our new lab director who is the first female lab director for JPL, which is super exciting is about to roll out her strategic initiatives for the next three years. And I'm really excited to say that one of the elements in workforce is the strategic plan for DEA but embedded in that is the requirement of inclusion being a metric for selection, evaluation and advancement of our managers and leaders and holding them accountable and having consequences for not delivering on those on that value is really critical for the consequences. We're still figuring that out. So curious. Yeah, but I think, you know, before, but uh um what when, as we're rolling this out, you know, giving leaders the tools of what, what do we mean by inclusive behaviors, defining that for them being clear about it and then giving them the guidelines, they need to be able to exhibit those behaviors. And then I think the consequence is, you know, it comes down to salary, you know, it, how does it have an impact on your, on your conversation with your manager about your, you know, your, your raise in the next year? Your performance, right? Evaluation, your raise, your raise is lower or what have you, you get a different target. Yeah. Fascinating. OK. Um We already are talking so much um and giving so much substance. I wanted to see if anyone already is ready with a question and if so I'd love to start hearing from the audience. I know it's early, it's the first session of the day and on the main stage. But if people have questions so far for or uh something to add to our Panelist, happy to go to the audience. Wonderful. Hi, Darcy Forrest. Um I'm wondering if you have um if you're building into the culture, just how are you educating on D E I? Uh So I love hearing about it in terms of your performance. But are there programs? How are you just educating the general workforce about D E I and A? That's a great question. Yeah. So prior to me joining JPL, JPL had already had a pretty robust set of trainings that were opt in around bystander training, inclusive leadership and a ally ships, practicing ally ship, which are all really great trainings. Uh What I'm doing as a part of the roll out of strategy is for any we call them division leaders. So division managers who manage, you know, several 100 people and have multiple leaders underneath them, any of them who are raising their hand and saying we want to learn more. We want to really embed this in our work. I'm actually, I'm designing uh essentially a package of learnings for them that's tailored to their organizational need. Given the fact that JPL is so decentralized and has so many different kinds of leaders and people from both business as well as technical. I felt like it was really important to create that sort of customized learning experience. So I'm taking a package of research, insights, making them practical and actionable and tied to the strategic plan. Um and then facilitating dialogues with them um about how do they apply this to their own organizational setting? How big is JP L? Tell everybody about almost 7000 people and how many of those are managers? Roughly about 808 100 That's a lot of people to roll out, right? Learning and make sure people are. But I'm going with the I, uh I have a mentor of mine um in this space and she always says in this work, you have to go where the doors are open. So I'm going first with the people who are raising their hand and saying we want to be first in line for this, let us be your guinea pigs. I love them and then they can help spread and, and exact each other people. Nicole. How about you? Same question. Uh I have the, the benefit of, of working at N L I where we've been able to develop a lot of our own uh you know, IP around um best practices as it relates to um you know, diversity and inclusion. So um we've made that all available to our employees, but in addition to that, we're redesigning our own internal um uh D E I strategy so that we can add some additional resources for them in terms of training as well. And do you have an example of resources or training um in terms of, of, of how we would share those out? Um So training around ally around decision making and mitigating bias in decision making around how to demonstrate inclusive behaviors on a day to day basis, just daily acts of inclusion. Um So we're talking about all those things. I love that. Yeah. So um just to take a little, a little different tack for a moment, representation matters. I'm sure everyone here can agree for both of you. What is a favorite program or event at your organization that has highlighted the contributions by people of an underrepresented demographic go? Um I'm really excited to say that um after uh President Biden, you know, May Juneteenth, a national holiday. JP L took that as a um as a beacon to um institutionalize that it through an event that we launched last year um in partnership with our Black employee resource group. And in our first um inaugural event, you know, we, we brought in um oh L A uh uh an L A restaurateur um who's Black to provide a meal for all of our, we call them communities of inclusion, all of our employee resource groups. Um And then we had an event where we had speakers from the community. We had an artist in residence who did um uh like a living um art installation in on our mall um lab leadership spoke and we closed the event with everyone doing the electric slide, including the director. Um I hope you have a video of this. We do. It was amazing. Um um And that really, actually, and then, you know, um several months later, we even did um when we finally got paid parental leave as part of our benefits package, uh We uh our new lab director um helped us host a dance party on dancing at that is one of my take away from this channel. You can really dance it that a lot of dancing. I love that Nicole. Do you have an example of how you've worked on um elevating under represented groups at your organization? I certainly can't um compete with dancing and, and uh the painting in the mall U F S. Yeah. Um You know, fortunately we have a fairly diverse workforce at N L I. Um and we're always working toward making sure that underrepresented voices are um elevated. And so, um you know, regularly, we invite members of our own team to speak uh during our weekly podcast. And um so we just recently did one that I was a part of on intersectionality and impostor syndrome and that was at the tail end of Women's History Month. And so we, we try to do that on a very regular basis. So I would, I would say that's probably my favorite, but um I'm, we're looking for more opportunities to do more things like that. I love that. Yeah, I just wanted to see if there was another burning question in the audience. I see there are a few hands right here. You just introduce yourself and ask your questions. Good morning. I'm Sherry hick from climate impact partners. One of the things our team is really pushing us to is put our money where our mouth is meaning like what targets are we setting and what are we willing to communicate externally? And I just wondered, how have you thought about that? And I think we all know some of this data is even challenging. How do we think about measuring D E? And I, and I'd love to hear what you're doing and, and where you think the opportunities are for us to lead. Thank you. Um, when you say, uh, measuring targets, you mean in terms of uh, targets for D E I, how are you measuring? Yeah. So I think the, uh, the initial assessment for that is so important, important because, um, you will set your targets based on, um, what's in the organization, right? What voices are currently underrepresented or have you identified where there are areas that, um, there are voices that are missing. And so you'll set your targets against that. Um And then in terms of what you're willing to communicate, being, being prepared to communicate regularly and often about your progress against the E I is going to keep you accountable to making sure that you're working towards those targets. So just, you know, being open about it is going to be part of the, the strategic plan. Yeah, so at JPL, what we did was we first started, we took a hard look at our historical data to really understand where those gaps were and evaluated that against the potential workforce population. So, you know, where is their opportunity, opportunity, where are we missing the mark and then that really guided our both our strategic goals as well as our strategic strategic priorities. So we've been, we're being really laser focused. So we're specifically saying that in the next year, we want to focus on increasing the number of uh increasing the number and retaining, increasing, sorry, increasing our hires and re and tension of Black engineers, uh increasing the number of women in senior technical leadership roles. Um And then additionally, um increasing psychological safety in our teams. So, um so we're, and so we're working on building out those metrics for our leaders and managers so that they can have their own dashboard to really see what their progress is against their peers, love using the data. We have another question here. Hi, I'm Stephanie Lewis. Um from her campus media, I was curious how you think about calling out certain work initiatives, things that you're doing as kind of our D E I work our D E I initiative, you know, this D E I workshop, we're hosting versus feeling like, you know, D E I are core values of us as a company and they're embedded in everything that we do. I think we're kind of trying to figure out at first in the last few years, it was, here's our D E I and here's what we're doing. And now we're starting to feel like if this is our D E I work, is this our non D E I work should just everything have D E I embedded and, and how you strike that balance. Yes. So, so briefly, go ahead. Yes, everything should have the E I embedded, right? It should just be part of the ways of working of the organization. So maybe initially when you're not, when you're just sort of um beginning that D E I journey and you're trying to get people aligned to what your goals are and understanding what the, what the behaviors are that you're expecting. Then you can say this is how we're, we're measuring, this is our D E I strategy. Um But ultimately, you want that to be just woven through all of your ways of working. I think, you know, a final word briefly. Yeah, I completely agree. I think it's about um getting that buy in and commitment from the top. Who, who can say uh unequivocally that this is a, this is a commitment and this is critical to the success of our organization. And then, and that gives you the mandate to really embed the strategy um into the business. Perfect. Thank you so much, both of you for those wonderful insights. There was so much more. I hope we was hoping to get to, but um it was such a rich conversation as it was so. Thank you so much.