Fundamentals matter: A DEI leader’s perspective on new Women in the Workplace research
This year’s ninth installment of McKinsey’s annual Women in the Workplace survey, developed in partnership with LeanIn.Org, is a sobering reminder that there is no substitute for hard work when it comes to creating a more inclusive and gender-balanced workplace. We have and will continue to expand the ways in which we find new talent sources and adapt our ways of working as a means of attracting and retaining women in our leadership pipeline. These innovations play an important role, but by far the most important thing we can do to support more women in their career growth is to get the fundamentals of individualized support right—things like robust sponsorship and needs-based support for professional development. At McKinsey, we have been reshaping our talent system and our diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) approach around that reality.
Programs help—but they are no substitute for the fundamentals
In this year’s report, I found it striking that women focused much more on their jobs’ features than on the programs offered by their companies when describing what really affects their commitment to stay and advance. For example, the report found that women ranked flexible work benefits higher than parental leave when asked about the factors that influence their choice of where to work—a sign that they are thinking more about their day-to-day experiences than the important, yet periodic, moments of need.
As a DEI functional leader, it’s often easier to think about programs and tools layered on top of “regular” talent offerings because these are the innovations we can most easily lead and drive on our own. And there is certainly a time and a place for those. We have long had an in-depth “reboarding” program designed to support all colleagues returning from extended leave, and not long ago, we increased family leave lengths for all colleagues to reinforce our commitment to supporting both mothers’ and fathers’ need to balance parenting responsibilities.
But this year’s report findings remind us of the limits of what we can achieve “just” through institutional offerings like these. For example, it is impossible to close gaps in sponsorship for a woman returning from maternity leave without knowing what good sponsorship actually is and how it manifests throughout her career. Great support programs are an amplifier, but cannot be a substitute, for having good people processes already in place.
If we want to move the needle as DEI leaders, we also need to be putting time and energy into making sure our people processes reinforce the day-to-day experience that we aspire our colleagues to have.
Reinvest in our people processes
This year we have taken a fresh look at the way we apply our DEI best practices, focusing more on embedding what we know works—especially with women—within our core people processes. Here are two examples.
Structuring sponsorship. Year over year, our Women in the Workplace research has shown how opportunity creation by senior leaders is fundamental to an individual’s success. We know that factors like unconscious bias and assumptions about what sponsorship means can make it harder for women to obtain this support. As a result, we have worked with leaders across our firm to make sure they are having name-by-name conversations to ensure the right sponsorship support is in place for all of our consulting colleagues. We supplement these discussions with aggregate insights from our sponsorship and mentorship survey to identify any persistent gaps between men and women across practices or offices and then provide individualized interventions as needed. This is consistent with the findings in this year’s report that top performing companies are more likely to actively track the number of sponsors and mentors for priority employee segments. So far, we have found that the rigor we put behind this kind of tracking is especially helpful in ensuring equitable outcomes at career inflection points (most notably, during partner elections), but it also helps to build women’s confidence throughout their early careers.
Innovating the Way We Work. The Women in the Workplace research has consistently found that inclusive workplaces are fundamental to day-to-day satisfaction—particularly for women of traditionally marginalized identities. The challenge we and others face is to systematically create an inclusive environment that allows individuals to bring their authentic selves to work but that also makes colleagues comfortable raising needs and concerns to those around them in a constructive way. In our context, with more than 4,000 teams “on the ground” with clients on any given day, the team dynamic is the most important factor shaping individuals’ day-to-day experiences. As part of our “Way We Work” team operating system, we have embedded questions in our biweekly team survey that specifically measure inclusion to give team leaders an ongoing picture of how they are doing at creating an open and welcoming team environment. We have also given individuals an option to indicate in the survey if they feel that the team is not working inclusively. In such instances, teams can opt to have a facilitated session to set new norms that will help them improve.
These are just some of the steps we are taking to bring lessons from our body of Women in the Workplace research into the core of how we manage our exceptional talent. But like many of our clients and most large organizations around the world, we still have a lot of work to do to reach our goals. I look forward to continuing the conversations and exchanging ideas about new innovations that can make a difference—and most important, how we can embed good practices into the way we work each and every day.