Navigating New Work-Life Realities – Carla Grant Pickens & Vanessa Bohns

Carla Grant Pickens, IBM’s vice president of leadership Development & Succession and Global Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer, as well as Vanessa Bohns, ILR associate professor and author of the book, “You Have More Influence Than You Think,” join ILR Dean Alex Colvin to discuss the unique challenges that companies have faced during COVID, and how both employers and employees can adapt moving forward.   

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Transcript

Jeff Amaral  
Work is all around us. It defines us. The future of work impacts nearly every person on our planet. And the ILR School at Cornell University is influencing policy and practice around the world. In this episode of Work! Exploring the future of work, labor and employment, Dean Alex Colvin, speaks with Carla Grant Pickens, Global Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer and Vice President leadership development and inclusion for IBM, as well as Vanessa Bonds, ILR associate professor and author of the book, You Have More Influence Than You Think.

Alex Colvin  
Thanks to both Carla and Vanessa, for joining us today. I'm really looking forward to hearing from both of them and their insights. The topic we're talking about today, the impact of the pandemic on work life issues, is something that I think we've all become far more familiar with, then perhaps we ever could have imagined a couple of years ago. The pandemics broken down barriers between our home and our work lives to a really profound extent and transformed the way that we think about that work life interrelationship. Nowadays with the availability of highly effective vaccines, we're seeing more people returning to the office. But we also know that the office isn't the same as it was before the pandemic. Things have changed, both in our home and our work lives. Higher quality of work life balance is something that we're seeing lots of employees demanding some of them even choosing to move away from existing jobs because of the transformative experience of the last year and a half. Here at ILR we've been studying issues  around the workplace for some 75 years since we were founded. And we've had a history of exploring the tensions and conflicts that have always existed between employees and organizations. We visited studying both natural conflicts that arise but also the potentials for collaboration. Today, we're going to be exploring that in the context of these new issues that arise in figuring out the work life balance in a situation where we're working in a different way than we ever worked before. As we think about navigating through these difficult times. We know it's put extraordinary challenges on leaders in business and beyond. I'm gonna turn to you Carla, first off to ask you a little about how your organization, how IBM has helped  navigate through this period of uncertainty.

Carla Grant Pickens  
We've been very, very intentional at IBM about how we're responding to the impact of remote work. We found that as you've stated, you know women were significantly impacted. So we really focused in on listening to our employees, listening to their needs. And we actually co created with them and out of that, very organically, we had the work from home pledge that came out of the women's community and it was really all about how we're going to respect boundaries. How they proceeded you're so exposed with your work life and seeing a broader lens of what home looks like. Your kids coming into the picture your spouse's and others and so people felt I can't be 100% during the day because there are many things that could be going on in my in my home. And so we addressd that in many ways. We kind of do what we call like kind of crowdsourcing, getting feedback on, we need to be adaptable to be resilient. What's gonna help with the success of working remotely? One of the biggest areas we heard most about was, hey, you know, I really need the ability to take time off. So we provided additional time for leave. We also provided additional time off if you want it to take a leave of absence if you want it to potentially move to a part time schedule. So we really did offer flexibilities where we really address the needs with employees, meeting them where they were. We were extremely focused, and our CHRO was talking about this pilot  is being intentionally flexible. And this is going to look differently for every company and for every team. The other thing that we did is tools. So tools became really, really important to engage and collaborate. So new ways of working like we're on Zoom today. We use things to create co-create and we're really assure we're going to continue to be able to be innovative and get to one another quickly so we use things like Box for files and WebEx and we use Slack. So lastly, we really, really again focused on meeting employees where they are. So that means our managers and our leaders, we had to provide them with guides and guidelines on how to be better leaders and how to communicate more frequently or transparently in this remote world.

Alex Colvin  
Yeah, I think that's a really important important point that the intentionality about why we're doing things. I think that's one of the things that pandemics forced us to do is think about what we're doing. A lot of our existing routines were broken up, and now we're opening in a different manner. So we have to, it forces us essentially to think about how we're approaching things. So the other thing that was interesting that you mentioned is the question about how this is impacted disproportionately women vs. men. And one of the things we know in the societal research is that women continue to bear a higher proportion of the burden of care, both child care and elder care. As an organization, how do you how do you think about coming out of hopefully out of the pandemic, and maintaining momentum around achieving gender equity in the organization's given all that we've been through. 

Carla Grant Pickens  
So look, you know, we went into last year really thinking about this. We weren't sure what the impact would be. And we saw right away that 2 million women left the workforce. Like in the first half. And then our institute of business value did a study and that ended up growing to like 5 million women globally. And it's just growing. And so we really did focus in on having goals really being transparent and setting goals with intention around how we were going to grow and to grow our workforce, and how we wanted to make sure we retained our women and our people of color across a diverse line, across all of our diverse groups. So we really begin to talk about let's make room a lot of people say how are you making room to ensure you're growing in an inclusive way? And so we did really focus in on how we were going to engage through sponsorship, we created some programs or women's programs. We continue with the programs that we would normally do face to face. We made them virtual, we expanded them virtually. We had guest speakers, we made them really interactive, and we also did inclusion on leadership training. So we thought that it was important that we did a few things. We were amidst the pandemic, and we also had a race crisis that hit us really shortly after the pandemic. What we heard from our employees was, hey, you know, I think it's really, really important that our leaders need need to really learn how to do better and really be more empathetic and compassionate and you need to really learn about topics and get uncomfortable. We  heard that quite a bit. Being comfortable with being uncomfortable with topics you're not used to discussing. So we did spend time and we trained 30,000 managers across the globe around empathy and compassion and this resiliency and how to make sure that your team is really resilient. We also deployed diversity and equity, diversity and inclusion training and the we also deployed  how to have a conversation about race, a race module, digital offering with the conversation guide, and we offer workshops we're continuing to do with our managers understanding identity and understanding intersectionality and how to really build more inclusive behaviors in the workplace. And that's been going on pretty much for the past 18 months. 

That's an incredibly busy agenda despite, you know, everything we're dealing with, in the pandemic, right, which I think is is one of those, you know, important lessons that there's a lot of important issues that you know, we couldn't really leave aside during this period and it's, you know, it's been a longer period, I think that many of us had hoped but, you know, the reality is that we had to keep addressing things and not let the time pass by. I want to turn now to to Vanessa, and I want to ask you questions, as you are a social psychologist and you study influence and conflict. Well, what should people in organizations consider as we navigate these kind of new work life realities we've been talking about?

Vanessa Bohns  
When I think of the challenges presented by the shift to sort of more hybrid or remote work from a more psychological or organizational behavior research sort of perspective, interestingly, so many of the things you've already been talking about, and so many of the solutions really show up there as well. And I think looking at that literature, there's really three main issues that pop up that I think we want to be aware of. So the first one is the risk that in a remote hybrid world, certain voices start to get left out of important conversations. And specifically, those voices tend to be the people who are working from home who may want to impact decisions that they care about, but they simply don't have as much impact as the people who are on the ground in the office. And that's for some very basic reasons, right? It's easy to stay top of mind when you're physically present with other people. There's just a basic level of attention we give to other people in our vicinity. That's evolutionary, we just pay more attention to actual physical people around us. Research on social influence actually shows that when we are trying to make a point when we're doing it through a mediated communication channel, things do have less impact or are less impactful when we try to do it in a mediated way than if we're actually face to face with someone. We simply lose a lot of the nonverbals that you get when you're face to face. Not to mention the fact that you also don't know a lot about the group dynamics that are happening in a room that you're not actually in. So that's the first challenge we see. The second challenge I see is blurring work life boundaries, right.,That can happen when people are working from home to results in burnout. Connectivity is a great thing. The idea behind it is that you know, it should give us a lot of flexibility. We can work anytime from anywhere, right? But I think a lot of us have seen that actually results in us working all the time from everywhere. And so that's not good for anyone because that's the kind of condition that can lead to burnout. And we know that burnout has all sorts of negative consequences for individuals but also for the organization, right? It leads to disengaged employees, leads to dissatisfied employees, it leads to employees who leave. So that's the second issue I can see. And then a third issue that is sort of a challenge to keep in mind is this idea that conflict can escalate much quicker and much more intensely when you're communicating through mediated channels and when people are in different locations, then in person. So just like you have more sort of innate attention in person, you also kind of have this default of trust, the social connection with someone else in person we can imagine, you know, there things that I would never say to someone in person that maybe I feel comfortable saying when there's this distance, and especially over email. There's lots of miscommunication that can happen over email, especially right miscommunication of tone. And so when you're not having difficult conversations in person, and when you're trying to have these difficult  conversations from a distance through mediated channels, there's a potential for greater conflict. And so those are sort of the three challenges that I can see coming from hybrid work that we would want to be aware of.

Alex Colvin  
So you know those all seem as a substantial challenge to deal with, what what do we think about for solutions, and in addressing them?

Vanessa Bohns  
It's important to think of solutions that kind of two levels, right? We see so many articles out there with individual solutions, and I think there's a place for those, but we also want to think about these more sort of systemic practice oriented normative kinds of solutions that aren't just about the responsibilities on you to stay relevant to protect your time to you know, manage this yourself, but we're actually going to implement broader policies and actually make this easier for everyone. So that's one of the reasons I love the policies that Carla was talking about. So if you start just for example, from the first one that I was talking about this idea that you know, some voices, maybe have less impact if they're at home in terms of influencing decisions that are taking place in the workplace. And research shows that actually the content of what you say matters more when you are in a mediated context than if you're in person. In person  you can get away with kind of saying things jumping in, you know, it's smoother, there's more nonverbals. When you're kind of the box on Zoom, you have to have a specific thing that you're going to say and your words actually matter. So part of the individual solution is actually planning out what you're going to say, planning out the content of your argument. But then at the same time, there has to be a broader awareness of the fact that these kinds of conversations are putting peopleat a disadvantage, right? And so practices that can be implemented to sort of counteract that. So one really simple example is that you don't just go in and say, okay, here's what we're thinking, you know, anyone opposed done, right? You actually take the time to go through each individual who's at the meeting and ask them what they think. And everybody gets time everybody gets space to say their opinion. And that ensures that you know, you don't have this cohort, that's most likely to people who have been seeing each other in the office, who have it all figured out and everyone feels like they have to follow suit. So that's one thing. If we turn to sort of the second big issue that I mentioned, the burnout issue. There's a lot of suggestions for how to individually manage burnout. So for example, you can designate certain areas in your home to be you know, work free zones where I don't do work here, this is my leisure time and my leisure place. But again, it's up to everybody. Right? And so there are certain things for example, Carla was mentioning taking time off, right? That's huge. But we've seen that there are organizations that allow people to take as much time off as they'd like, and no one does it. Because no one is seeing anybody else do it. No one at the higher levels are doing it. And so part of it is modeling that taking advantage of these resources, and also paying attention to the norms that we're setting that impacts everybody's ability to sort of manage their work life balance. So one thing my colleague Laura Giurge and I have done is look at studies where people send emails, you know, during the time that works for them, right, maybe in the evening, that's when I can get my emails done. So I send out my emails, but maybe for you, that's the time that you're unwinding. And I don't expect you to get back to me right away, but I don't make that explicit, right? You might think oh my gosh, now I need to respond during my off time. Right? So we're really good at conveying when something's urgent. We have like our all caps urgent in the subject line, we have our red exclamation points, but we're not as good at conveying when you know, this is my time for work, you get back to me when it's your time for this is not urgent. And so setting norms where you communicate that this is not urgent, get to it on your time is another sort of practice that we can implement. And then the last thing in terms of conflict, and I know, Alex, you'll probably have more to say about the conflict issue, but a lot of our intuitions about how to manage conflict are off. And we often forget that in person face to face is best, if not richer communication is best. We tend to think we can lay out our point in an email, point by point, you know, as conflict is arising, but in fact that's where things can get really rough and tricky and a lot of context gets lost.

Alex Colvin  
Yeah, just picking up on that last point about how we think about dealing with conflict. In my field setting conflict resolution is that during the pandemic, there's there's been a really surprising I think explosion of use of more richer conflict resolution mechanisms, like mediation, particularly online, and where you could have those conversation about the conflicts that were going on. And to your point about this sort of email list as not really being a rich form of conversation., when you could actually get the zoom or teams meeting where you you'd have a conversation, you could ask questions, effective meetings, we've been able to use that effectively, but it was because of that richer communication medium that people were using. The other thing that was jumping into my head was you talking about about calling on individuals and and you can go around the group that way. And we seem to do that more than we did in the traditional kind of team format. There's this tricky elements. One of the things I've been noticing when we're coming back to work in the office is how to manage when you've got a hybrid team with some people in person and some remote and you do like a meeting and some of you in a conference room and some of you are online. I'd be curious Carla what your experience at IBM has been like with that and sort of how do you how do you manage this sort of hybrid space now we've got some hybrid teams, some people remote, some different person. What do we do there? 

Carla Grant Pickens  
Yeah, so we've actually been upgrading all of our  physical facilities, but we had really started this work of really providing these really open agile workspaces where people can come together, they could do stand ups, they can, you know, rally around a whiteboard. Less offices, more open tables or places you can co-create. And some great example of that is you know, we discussed potentially having a meeting and everyone couldn't be face to face. So we decided, well, you know what, we're not going to have part of the group face to face and the other part not face to face. Everybody will be remote so that everybody will be on a fair playing ground. And like you said, Vanessa, I really really love the reach out. Having every gone around to make sure every voice is heard. Or if you do an open dialogue, having that emotional awareness to say well who didn't speak during this meeting, and then having the awareness to go in and say well Vanessa I noticed you didn't have a comment. Do you have anything you like to add? So So those are just ways that we're really approaching that work, but also these smaller breakout groups are really helping us as well because we're able to do a lot more things like we are actually trying to do small things. You have a mindfulness workshop. It  deosn't always have to be this planned agenda. Go around just to talk just to see how people are feeling what they're doing to adapt. How are you? How are you getting through your day and being adaptable? You know, you're getting neat ideas like I'm up to walking about an hour a day  and people are saying and role modeling by saying I'm taking a break from 12 to 1 every day to take a walk midday. I feel refresh, I feel distress, or I'm doing an evening walk or I'm writing in my gratitude journal. Or, you know, I'm doing aerobics online around the world. So these are things we can learn from one another. And we actually gathered a lot of ideas with our leaders on let's let's come up with like the things you can be doing to get more interactive with your team but also, like you said, encouraging the step away, is very, very important for that long term resiliency.

Alex Colvin  
I do think there's something to that, breaking down the kind of levels and barriers which can, I think be one of the positive aspects of some of the outreach we do in in remote work. You know, one of the comments that we've gotten online was talking about neuro diverse individuals as being an example of a group who found that the shift to immediate online communication actually had some significant benefits in terms of equalizing the playing field in terms of communication. I'm gonna turn to we've got a bunch of great questions starting to come in from our audience. I think I'm going to pull a few of these few of these out here. One of the ones that I've been hearing a lot about is the question of fairness and equity across all employees in similar situations. You know what, how, how do we think about fairness and equity in the reactions of employees to these different experiences? Vanessa, do you want to maybe take a crack at talking about that?

Vanessa Bohns  
One of the things that we talked about, you know, when we were sort of preparing for this was the value of things like micro affirmations. You know, it could be just showing that you're listening. It could be the things that you know, Carla and I have been talking about, about actually engaging people like making sure you go around and you've heard everybody's voice that you have this emotional awareness. And these little things, you know, we think that they don't have a major impact, but they can actually show people that we do care if they're struggling, you know, like with rough internet connection, if they're struggling with kids at home, if they're struggling with something they don't feel like everyone's just moved on without them and left them behind, which I think is a major concern. And if you show that actually we do want to continue to engage you, and we use these ways of kind of pulling people back in I think that can be a way to sort of restore some of the inequities we see.

Carla Grant Pickens  
Yeah, you know, we talked about this, those micro appreciations are so just they just go such a long way. And it can be small, like you could send a thank you card we have virtual thank you cards you can choose from. So So those things become really key but also in this point in time, regular feedback to your teams and your employees. And so something that we do very intentionally is we ask managers to do a formal check in like every quarter to talk about how you're progressing to your goals, how was it going in that quarter? It could be very, very agile, and we're asking them to also have an annual career conversation. I've had amazing career conversations this year. People would think that during the pandemic, that maybe this is something people are putting on hold, but they're not. And I've had amazing conversations where we spend time as leaders with our employees and ask them about what's next in your career. Where do you think you're doing right what skills you want to build? What type of role you're interested in, in next, where do you see your career going? These are those extra touch touch points that you can do with your teams to ensure that they remain engaged and so are you.

Alex Colvin  
Interesting you're talking about that connects them to the questions around around how you engage your leaders, your managers, and as you're trying to bring in these policies because a lot depends on them. being able to implement this effectively and and to respond to these kind of various employee needs and demands. I mean, this managing under the pandemic remote and hybrid work puts an enormous strain on the managers and leaders. How how do you go about engaging and making sure that they're handling this? Well? 

Carla Grant Pickens  
Yeah, so what what we really are focused on is the experience of the manager and the experience of the employee at IBM and so we co-create with them. Co-creation with employees is really key. A lot of things are still leader lead, and what we found in this at 18 months if you don't do it with your teams, and you do without your teams, you may miss the mark. And lastly, you have some success metric metrics that you go back, you iterate, you get feedback, you survey, and you know what outcomes you want to achieve but you you have measurements. And you make sure you go back and use it will show that you've met them and then if you have not, how are you going to iterate to make it better as you continue to do this work?

Vanessa Bohns  
You know, one thing to keep in mind is that as much as this has been a major challenge and a shift it's also just a huge opportunity. And a lot of managers are excited to try some new things. And so keeping that in mind that this is actually a time where people are more open than usual, to changing the way that they get things done. And so you can implement these things that maybe in the past there might have been pushback, but now people are like, "Whatever. I'll try something new." 

Alex Colvin  
Yeah, I think that's one of the real lessons we have learned is that that is that we are more adaptable I think that we that we might have thought we were you know, I think if you had asked us two years ago, you know, could we all do this kind of level of work, we probably would have said no, that's crazy. I mean, there's no way that'll work. You know, people, people are more adaptable I think that we often think people are more resilient than than we think. Here's a question I see because it is a tricky one that I'm going to check to maybe Carla to talk about her experience on that somebody asked about how employers have adjusted dealt with employee disciplinary performance improvement actions and plans during the pandemic and moving forward. And that kind of jumps out to me because, you know, I think we know that their employees who are having difficult situations before the pandemic and maybe in a performance improvement type situation. Then we went into this pandemic and everybody's disrupted, and then we're still trying to manage people's performance through the pandemic. You know, when to some degree were sort of saying, Well, you know, that's the COVID years and so everybody gets a pass on stuff, right? How do we handle that? How do we continue to kind of manage and deal with those kind of difficult disciplinary or performance issues while also dealing with all the pandemic stuff?

Carla Grant Pickens  
Yeah, I think that it that it has been a challenge. You know, I think that you continue to work with your employees the leaders begin to continue to work with their employees to work through any type of performance issues. You're just doing it in a virtual way. And that's why I said we really focused in on the point away in which we interacted last year where it was more frequent. So opposed to waiting for like the cursory annual review at the end of the year where people may be surprised by their performance, we are doing more frequent interactions every quarter. And you could do it at any time where you could collaborate around goals and give regular feedback, even virtually through our tools by which we actually measure performance with our employees. And so a regular dialogue is really, really key. So you're really managing those things on the onset or not waiting for them to kind of fester over a longer period of time. And you're right, you know, in the scenario where people may take breaks, they may have to take time off, they may have been ill from COVID, you shouldn't be penalized for that. We made that really, really clear with our leaders that we don't want people to be penalized because they have to take care of their children because they have to take time off. They're ill someone in their family is ill. And people were very worried about that. And so you have to again, this is where we talk about meeting people where they are, showing that empathy and compassion, but also being able to have the discussion on how do we get things back on track?

Alex Colvin  
Yeah, I think that's some of the hardest issues that you know managers are facing right now and I think it's that tension between, you know, the kind of imperatives that still exist of, you know, ensuring we have performance and we're getting the work done at the same time as you know, compassion being, you know, really important during this time and to recognize the difficult situations that employees are confronting in their lives. And I think that's to go back to our, you know, starting point premise, right, we were seeing this kind of collapse of the work life boundaries. You know, and this was sort of the traditional, we look back in our sort of labor history going back to the 1950s. You know, we've had this stark division between the world of work and world of family and they're separate and they shall never meet. Well, they've been, that boundary's being gradually getting more permeable over time. And we've just seen it, you know, collapse over the last year and a half and, and that forces us to deal with with these different aspects, you know, totally new, totally new way.

Vanessa Bohns  
I think a lot of what you just said as well made me think about all the things we've had to ask people for over the past year too. Many of us have been confronted with these situations where we've had to rely on our co-workers. We've had to ask bosses for, you know, more flexible arrangements. And what I've found myself and in my research, as well as talking to people is that people are much more amendable and happy to make adjustments and to work with people and to sort of make things work then we tend to think. We usually hate asking for things,  we worry about rejection. But I hope for many of us that we've learned that that is actually a way that we can shape our work environment in the way that we really want to and that we have more influence than we think to be able to do that and that people are more willing to work with with us than we think. So as I said earlier, this really is a chance for things to shift or change. And I think that's true for bosses to try new things. I think that's true for us, too, to try new things and and see what works for us. And I think that it should give us some sense of autonomy and optimism in the end.

Carla Grant Pickens  
Yeah, so I'll go back to kind of where I started with being intentionally flexible. So listening to your teams listening to your employees, and that co-creation, it doesn't have to be leader lead, and this is just something that I think all of us have learned. I think the other thing and I think making room for others. So we talked a lot about that making sure you ensure every voice is heard in a meeting that no one's left out. But also this is a time in which fostering a culture of inclusion, the inclusive behavior is really being intentional about that means you've got to have to be creative. And then lastly, I think that the last thing that I wanted to share is you know, you know leading with that empathy and compassion and being really transparent and just really falling into that vulnerable place where you don't have to have all the answers. Sometimes it's just important to be a great listener, but also being able to make that room to really solution and provide the interventions that are necessary. Don't wait too long to be responsive, and act accordingly is really, really key. So that's what I recommend.

Alex Colvin  
I think that's such a great message because I think one thing that you know we can really take away to a point across political comments is that this has been a hard time for people over this pandemic, in so many ways and and it has intruded on our personal lives and work lives and there's the sort of conflicts we're dealing with, but, you know, people's good faith in people I think, in general are of good faith are trying to work through things. You know, I think there's there is possibility from for coming up with solutions but also to take away lessons that we've learned from the experience and apply them going forward that will be helpful to us. I want to thank so much both Vanessa Bonds and Carla Grant Pickens, our two speakers today. It's been a real pleasure talking with you both today and look forward to great conversations in the future. Thank you.

Jeff Amaral  
Thank you for listening to "Work!" You can subscribe to our podcast at work.ilr.cornell.edu or on iTunes. Do you have a recommendation for a guest or topic to be discussed on a future episode? Just click on the link in the show notes of this episode and leave your suggestions. Again, thank you for listening!

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