Advancement of women in the workforce

As a follow up to the cover story in the last issue of HRM, which looked at whether women make better business leaders, Stacey Sheppard now takes a look at some of the companies who are taking a leading role in the advancement of women and asks what HR professionals should be doing to ensure that this seemingly untapped talent pool can achieve its full potential.

The advantages of having more women in senior executive positions became apparent in the first of this two-part series on women and leadership. The benefits that female leaders can bring to the table are certainly hard to ignore and include increased profitability, a greater sense of purpose for the company, the recognition of positive emotions in the workplace, building and nurturing a closer sense of community within the company, and a more collaborative leadership style.

Increased profitability alone should be reason enough for companies to sit up and take notice of the potential held by this particular segment of the workforce. For some organizations, this is something that they were lucky enough to recognize quite some time ago and because of this they have been able to reap the benefits and are now industry leaders in the advancement and retention of women in the workplace.

There is a lot to be learned by looking at these companies and some of the strategies that they employ to ensure a more diversified workforce when it comes to gender. Especially as many of those companies trying to jump on the bandwagon aren’t necessarily approaching it in the best way. “Most companies have attacked this piecemeal,” says Betty Spence, President of the National Association for Female Executives (NAFE). “They’ve said, ‘Okay, let’s see what we have to do to make sure that our talent is being tapped. Let’s do some mentoring, let’s get a network together.”

All that helps, asserts Spence, but at the same time she points out that the best thing to do is to develop an overarching initiative to advance women in your organization. “If you’re going to develop that talent, and retain it you need to make sure that you’re looking at all the aspects that relate to making that talent work for you,” she says, highlighting General Mills and IBM as having the best initiatives in the country.

“What General Mills does is look at everything from soup to nuts. It looks at the hiring of women to make sure that they’re bringing in women that they know are going to stay and succeed. And, interestingly, the turnover rate is very low at General Mills. They think long-term. They hire someone to stay and not just to fill a gap,” explains Spence.

Hiring, mentoring, making sure women have the necessary contacts, exposure, sponsorship and support are all part of the initiative at General Mills. “They have various training programs onsite and offsite that women can participate in to make sure that they’ve got the necessary training in all of the aspects of running a business. They also make sure that there’s the flexible climate that allows for what women need in order to be able to have a work life balance, which is really critical,” she says.

This is something that Spence believes all companies should be striving to achieve. But, as she points out, these things are all good and well but companies who are implementing such initiatives also need to have some way of determining if their efforts are paying off. “At IBM, every couple of years they go back and survey their women to find out if the things that they’ve done are working, and then they implement new things according to what the women tell them,” Spence explains.

They must have been doing something right at IBM; since 1995 when the company instated its women’s initiative there’s been a 592 percent increase in women executives, according to Spence, which is certainly an achievement. The task forces that IBM established really got the ball rolling and now there are 40 women’s councils around the world and 42 women’s forums to help support the advancement of women.

Dr Sam Collins is founder of Aspire, an executive coaching and development organization for women, agrees that conducting some form of internal research is the best way to find out what will and wont work for your employees. Focusing purely on external research, she says, means that any business cases will inevitable fail. “You really need to look at what’s going on in your own company and to do some surveys or some research, or use staff surveys to get some data as to what the pinch points are for people leaving and staying, and do gender splits on those,” says Collins.

And depending on the results of this research, there are many things that companies can do ranging from looking at their recruitment policies, to looking at training and coaching. Even things like quotas and targets and looking at their flexible working initiatives, says Collins.

Joanna Barsch, is a director at McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm, and she believes that there are also certain things that women could do to help themselves advance. “The most important thing for anybody to become a better leader is to have opportunities for growth,” she says. “Women on average have a tendency to hold back from opportunity. So if women were to do one thing differently it should be to pursue opportunity and to grow from it, even when it’s a mistake or a failure. That will help them accelerate both their capability to lead as well as their path to advancement.”

Another method that women should be using to foster their careers is networking, but Spence points out that women are more often than not excluded from many of the informal networks. “Women aren’t in the bars after work and they’re not on the golf course with the men on the weekends where a lot of those things take place. So if you can figure out a way to make sure that women get into those networks, things might change.”

But things will only change, according to Barsch, if women are able to learn a different approach to networking. Evolutionary biologists, she says, believe that men have broader, more shallow networks in general than women do, and women think of relationships as friendships. Therefore women need to be able to see their network development in a more strategic way.

But the responsibility for this networking does not lie solely with women themselves, and companies should be taking more of an active role in helping women gain access to these networks. At McKinsey, Barsch says they talk about sponsorship. “Companies who really want to do this have to do one thing and do it well, which is to ask their leaders for their conviction and commitment to helping women. Once a leader, man or woman, can do that, he or she can become a sponsor.” A sponsor is more effective than a mentor, according to Barsch, as it is somebody who believes in you, who creates opportunity for your growth, and who helps you when you fall and when you make a mistake.

However, one of the most harmful aspects that is creating a barrier to female advancement is in fact the mindset of HR professionals with regards to the age at which you must be to have already reached VP level. “I hear a lot of companies say that if you haven’t made it by the time you’re 35 or 40 you’re not going to make it,” says Barsch.

“But that’s ridiculous because that's when women are having their children and their children are young. Women need a longer rise to that pivotal level in the company and they should not be age constrained. So I think that is an area where HR professionals can make a huge difference. It’s embedded culturally because nothing is stopping a man from getting to the top by the time he’s 40.”

For this mindset to change, companies, and HR professionals in particular, need to start recognizing the benefits of helping to advance women up the corporate ladder. Rather than merely seeing it as something that has to be done because quotas dictate it or because of a desire to be seen to be doing the right thing.

A healthy strategy

Healthcare company WellPoint Inc. consistently ranks in NAFE’s list of the top 50 companies for executive women. CEO Angela Braly is also the only woman to serve as CEO of a Fortune 50 company. Randy Brown, Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer tells HRM about WellPoint’s approach to women in the workplace.

I think one of the things that we do that’s important, and our current CEO will tell you that she benefited from this, is a succession planning process that does not pigeonhole people. It’s a succession process that looks at skills required and the talent that people have regardless of a strict set of jobs you must progress through.

One of the things we say out loud to our associates is that if you work at WellPoint you don’t have to check who you are at the front door. Bring your whole self to work. You’re not just an executive, but you’re an executive and a mom or a dad, if you have kids, and it’s important that you be able to spend time on both.

For example, we have a benefit we call new parent transition week so that moms and dads can work part time on their first week back from leave, but we pay them full time pay. The reason for that is we know that for the first week back it’s hard to have your full head in the game, but we want to say thanks for coming back and we recognize that there’s a transition that has to occur.

We also have a lot of work-at-home programs. The work-at-home benefit is largely job dependent. Not every job can be done at home, but there’s a lot of times when people can work at home. So we’re flexible on where work gets done. Half of Angela’s staff do not work in our corporate headquarter city. They work somewhere else. Where work gets done, when it gets done, how it gets done, flexibility on all those things is very important.

A long legacy

IBM has long heritage of supporting women in the workplace and is frequently rewarded for doing so. With regular appearances on NAFE’s list top companies for female executives and recognition from the likes of Diversity Inc., Forbes and The Great Place to Work Institute. Patricia Lewis, Vice President of Human Resources at IBM tells us how they manage it.

At IBM we have a long heritage in supporting and addressing the needs of women and helping them to achieve that all important work/life balance. More than anything, for IBM it’s all about attracting top talent and women play a significant role in the ongoing success of the IBM company.

Our heritage actually goes back a good 120 years. We have been employing women since the 1890s and we had our first female VP in 1949. Between 1940 and 1943 alone one third of our manufacturing hires were women.

Women generally tend to have a more collaborative approach to leadership, which suits IBM’s culture of collaboration and often leads to innovation, a key value for us. Having women in senior leadership positions reflects the demographic mix of our workplace and of our client base.

Work/life integration is extremely important and luckily IBM is a leader in this field. For example, we offer flexible work options and job sharing, and in 2000 IBM created a $50 million global work/life fund to support our employee’s child and elderly care needs around the world.

For women in particular we run a variety of great programs from extensive development programs to technical programs, formal and informal mentoring programs, and career counselling. We currently have 40 women’s councils around the world and 42 women’s forums. Our Taking the Stage program also helps women to improve their communication skills and leadership presence.