Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Good morning, everyone.
I'm still in the British Isles, and today I want to weigh in on three rather somewhat controversial topics. The first is the DEi kerfluffle that seemed to be raised by ShRM, but.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Actually has been going on for quite.
[00:00:21] Speaker A: Some time about what is actually happening in DEI and several case studies that have come out in CNN and a few others. The second is I want to talk about civility and values at work in the face of the republican convention, angry discourse going on in the United States politically.
And then the third thing I want to talk about is completely different, which is the ROI of AI, which is actually a massively important topic.
Okay, DEI. So for some reason, I'm not exactly sure why, ShRM announced at their conference that they are officially eliminating the word equity from the DEI phrase. SHRM is a United States organization with about 330,000 members. So even though it does tend to speak as the policy making of organization for HR and the federal government, it only represents a very, very small percentage of the global human resources profession, because there are anywhere from ten to 15 million people or more in the profession. So it's a very small number, but nevertheless, they're well known. And the announcement actually created quite a flurry of backlash. And my perspective on it is actually.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: Very, very different from theirs.
[00:01:52] Speaker A: In some sense, the reason we have Dei goes back to the. You know, it really goes back to.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Slavery, in a sense, but it goes back to all of the bias that.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: Human beings are brought up with by their families, their communities, their schools, wherever they happen to grow up, and the tendency for people to use those biases for selection, promotion, pay evaluation and communications with others at work. And the idea behind Dei is that in the work environment, where our goal.
[00:02:29] Speaker B: Is to serve a customer or a.
[00:02:31] Speaker A: Stakeholder or a constituency, we really need to treat each other fairly. And the word that represents fairly is equity. So in some sense, equity, the word.
[00:02:45] Speaker B: That shrm is taking out of the.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: Concept, is the most important word of all, because equity, if you look it up in the dictionary, means fairness and justice.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: It does not mean equality.
[00:02:58] Speaker A: And there is this strange photo that.
[00:03:01] Speaker B: Keeps getting circulated around the Internet, which.
[00:03:03] Speaker A: Is, to me, completely incorrect, that shows that equity will raise a, a disadvantaged person to the level of a more advantaged person. No, that's really not what equity is about.
[00:03:16] Speaker B: Equity is about being fair.
[00:03:18] Speaker A: So if individual a is producing a level of output, put at a level of eight, and individual b is producing a level of output, it's a six, we would reward and develop and pay level of the first person higher. Well, if the first person happens to be female or african american or asian or some other minority group, by the way, women are not a minority anymore. They're actually a majority, then we wouldn't discount their performance because we didn't like their representation or we didn't feel comfortable with their representation for some reason. Now, the reason these biases existed isn't just because of our individual biases growing up, because organizations have biases. The CEO, the founders, the top management team tend to have opinions or religious beliefs or other experiences that they bring to the work. They oftentimes are in power positions. They started the company, and so their belief systems are oftentimes replicated amongst others.
[00:04:29] Speaker B: Both in who they hire and both in the behaviors.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: So the purpose of DEI is to counteract that on behalf of society and.
[00:04:39] Speaker B: Also on behalf of the company. And I think what went wrong with Dei, because I've been involved in this a long, long time. When I worked at IBM in the.
[00:04:46] Speaker A: 1970S and 1980s, we had affirmative action.
[00:04:50] Speaker B: And I thought it was very successful, to be honest.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: We were a very diverse company back then. I felt very comfortable with it, being a young jewish boy who probably wouldn't have fitted IBM normally in a more non Dei kind of world. But anyway, it felt to me that.
[00:05:09] Speaker B: It was kind of growing in importance.
[00:05:12] Speaker A: Through the many, many factors in society.
[00:05:16] Speaker B: Mostly immigration, increasingly diversity of the workforce.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: You know, in California, where I live, white Americans are the minority, actually. I think there's more African Americans in some communities, and there's more hispanic Americans in other communities in California. And so Dei grew up as not only a way to make companies fairer.
[00:05:40] Speaker B: And more equitable, but as a way to fix society.
[00:05:43] Speaker A: And I think that is where we went astray. There are lots of stories of, and you can read these online companies like.
[00:05:51] Speaker B: Coca Cola and others that were sued.
[00:05:54] Speaker A: For not promoting African Americans, laying people off indiscriminately based on race and so forth. And those were not viewed necessarily as.
[00:06:05] Speaker B: Bad business decisions, but they were eventually.
[00:06:07] Speaker A: Viewed as bad decisions for society and for the american economy.
[00:06:12] Speaker B: And so various laws have been passed.
[00:06:14] Speaker A: By the EEOC, and affirmative action was one of these. Now, the affirmative action.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: And by the way, this got really.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: Blown out of proportion in the George Floyd situation, where everybody in the country was so disgusted, in a sense, by what happened that many HR leaders decided that they were going to take the lessons of George Floyd and teach them to their employees. And that made employees very uncomfortable, because.
[00:06:43] Speaker B: People that are not necessarily biased or.
[00:06:46] Speaker A: Discriminatory by nature didn't really enjoy or appreciate training on unconscious bias or white fragility or microaggression that they didn't feel was appropriate to them. So I think it created a lot of animosity. And of course, what happened was politicians and some law firms picked up on this. And when the Supreme Court decision striking.
[00:07:13] Speaker B: Down affirmative action, by the way, only.
[00:07:15] Speaker A: For colleges and universities, not for businesses, but anyway, striking it down, law firms jumped in and started to sue or.
[00:07:23] Speaker B: Threatened to sue companies for having quotas.
[00:07:26] Speaker A: Or hiring targets or diversity targets. And this week, John Deere backed down from any DEI program. In fact, John Deere made a statement.
[00:07:35] Speaker B: They'Re getting rid of all DEI roles.
[00:07:37] Speaker A: In the company, which is kind of a little bit odd, but as did other tractor supply company, which then led to black farmers saying they won't buy John Deere tractors. So, anyway, this goes on and on and on. But I think what happened, from my.
[00:07:53] Speaker B: Perspective, talking to many of you and.
[00:07:55] Speaker A: Many, many companies, is the head of DEI became a social justice job, which it really didn't belong in, companies at all.
[00:08:06] Speaker B: And those social justice oriented DeI leaders really got a lot of pushback. Most of them have probably lost their.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Jobs or lost their positions doing this.
[00:08:16] Speaker B: And Dei is going to fold back.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: Into the business leadership mission of every business owner and every business leader. It's not going away at all. The companies we talk to, the good ones, are still publishing diversity metrics. They know that having a diverse and inclusive workforce and having equity in pay and equity in hiring and equity in promotion is critical to their success, to their hiring strategy, innovation, to their creativity. We did studies at Deloitte when I was there, that showed that diversity, by.
[00:08:54] Speaker B: The way, generational diversity, makes a big.
[00:08:56] Speaker A: Difference here, not just gender and race, also diversity of income, diversity of thinking styles, et cetera.
[00:09:04] Speaker B: We did studies at Deloitte, the most famous being the one called waiter, is that inclusion in your soup? That showed that the more diverse the.
[00:09:12] Speaker A: Team, the better decisions they make. And there have been studies, some of.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: Which have been debunked, by the way.
[00:09:19] Speaker A: By McKinsey, that claimed that diverse boards.
[00:09:24] Speaker B: Result in higher performing companies. That actually was debunked this last couple.
[00:09:28] Speaker A: Of months by somebody who went back and looked at the statistics and found that they were flawed.
[00:09:33] Speaker B: But nevertheless, this is a very common practice. And in a labor market like we.
[00:09:38] Speaker A: Live in today, where we have a.
[00:09:40] Speaker B: Shortage of workers and a shortage of.
[00:09:42] Speaker A: Skills, it's crazy to not think about your company in a diverse and inclusive way.
So for ShRm to remove the word equity from the idea, to me, is the opposite of what I would have done. I think this is all about equity.
[00:09:59] Speaker B: Not about bringing people up to the same level.
[00:10:02] Speaker A: So I would strike that photo that a lot of you have seen, but.
[00:10:06] Speaker B: I think it's about making sure that we're equitably treating everybody as a human being. You know, in 1980 or 1979 or.
[00:10:15] Speaker A: Whatever it was, when I joined IBM, I, we called it respect for the individual. And that's really what it is, is that we're all human beings, and we're basically all the same genetically, regardless of how somebody looks or their race.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: 99% of our or more of our.
[00:10:31] Speaker A: Genes are exactly the same. The skin color gene is a very small percentage, if you read the book cast, of what makes us different as human beings anyway, now we have, you know, horrible behavior going on in Washington, people calling women or african american people Dei candidates in a pejorative way, really bad behavior. So that gets me to number two, the lack of civility going on in this particular period of time. Now, if you live in the United States and most of you are aware of what's going on here politically, you are probably sick of the fighting and name calling going on between the Democrats and the Republicans, regardless of which side you're on.
And it's worse than name calling. It's degrading the intentions of your self, of your peer citizens. So we've got some pretty difficult politics going on here. The result of that, and the name calling that's somewhat started with Trump, but has been going on on both sides, results in a lack of civility. Civility just means using language in a respectful way and speaking to people in a polite and respectful way. And at work, particularly.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: But really, in life in general, when.
[00:11:59] Speaker A: You'Re civil to people, they accommodate your interest, they hear you, they listen to you, and we work better together. When you get angry at people, when you strike out at people, and it certainly happens for a lot of reasons.
[00:12:12] Speaker B: They react negatively and they feel threatened.
[00:12:15] Speaker A: And mostly bad things tend to happen. Well, we've really suffered from a lack of civility in the United States. I'm traveling through northern Europe, and I'm.
[00:12:25] Speaker B: Just amazed at some of these smaller.
[00:12:26] Speaker A: Countries, how much more kind and friendly people are in a whole variety of ways than they are where I live. And, you know, there's many reasons for this, but nevertheless, it really is an issue. And so, lo and behold, I'm doing research while I'm out of town and reading articles, and I run across some work that's being done by SHRm, called the civility index. It's not exactly clear how the numbers.
[00:12:56] Speaker B: Are calculated, but it's a one to 100 number.
[00:12:59] Speaker A: And in the number, the hundred means code red, constant incivility, zero to ten means no incivility at all. And so they somehow have surveyed tens of thousands of people and determined that in the United States, 37.5, or 38%, roughly, of Americans experience acts or instances of incivility multiple times per day over the past month while at work. In other words, more than a third of Americans are working in an environment where people are talking in some way that's upsetting them. 42% of Americans find incivil behaviors in their daily life, which turns into 171 million acts of incivility on the average day in the last month. 39% of the workplace civilities occur while they're at work, 37% in general. So, I mean, this is just really upsetting to me, hopefully to you, and.
[00:14:13] Speaker B: Really something for us to think about. In addition to being fair and equitable.
[00:14:18] Speaker A: At work, we really need to be respectful and listen.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: And right now, with the assassination attempt.
[00:14:26] Speaker A: On Trump and the ongoing election issues that we're going to have in the United States and in other parts of.
[00:14:33] Speaker B: The world, this sense of civility is really, really important.
[00:14:37] Speaker A: Now, you know, if you work in the hospitality industry, if you work in retail, if you work in transportation, if you work in entertainment, you're dealing with.
[00:14:47] Speaker B: Consumers all day, or in healthcare, you're.
[00:14:51] Speaker A: Dealing with patients, you're dealing with consumers. And so, of course, being civil and treating people with respect is a rule, in a sense.
[00:15:01] Speaker B: At work, you're not supposed to speak to people a certain way when they're customers. Well, the same thing goes for your peers.
[00:15:08] Speaker A: You know, it's funny in inflaming commentary about John Deere doing away with her DEI program, I read some of the comments on CNN and some other places. A lot of the arguments against the DEI program was, we don't want our.
[00:15:24] Speaker B: Employer telling us how to behave.
[00:15:27] Speaker A: Well, I kind of disagree with that. I think employers have the right to put together behavioral policies for customers, of course, and for internal conversations as well.
[00:15:39] Speaker B: And short of EEOC violations and other legal violations, we really need to set an example of how we're going to work together. There are companies that are very abrasive.
[00:15:52] Speaker A: And argumentative and sometimes very negative with each other. It starts at the top, usually, and.
[00:15:57] Speaker B: I won't mention any names, you know, who some of the CEO's are because.
[00:16:01] Speaker A: They'Re the ones that are on Twitter. The time, but that really doesn't work. And you know this, we know this, our leaders know this, but for some reason, 39% of Americans feel that we're not behaving well in the workplace. And I think that is coupled to the DEI issue.
[00:16:20] Speaker B: They're very, very related.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: So I'm disappointed in this. Traveling outside the United States, I see.
[00:16:26] Speaker B: That the world is not all like this everywhere. Maybe the United States is a little.
[00:16:30] Speaker A: Bit worse, but this study only studied the United States, so we don't really know what the lack of civility might.
[00:16:35] Speaker B: Be like in other countries.
[00:16:37] Speaker A: I think, by the way, one of the reasons that it feels like the United States might be a little bit tougher place to be is we have a very freedom first pioneering culture in the United States where people's individual rights to carry guns, to wear whatever they want, to do whatever they want, is kind of inbred into our culture, as.
[00:16:59] Speaker B: Opposed to the more collectivist cultures in older countries or very young countries.
[00:17:04] Speaker A: So some of this is just. We're like a teenager in a sense.
[00:17:08] Speaker B: Compared to the rest of the world.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: Okay, I'm not going to make a value judgment on anything more on those lines, but I want to point this out because I think we in HR actually have a massive amount of opportunity.
[00:17:19] Speaker B: To impact these issues. Number three, aihdenae.
[00:17:25] Speaker A: Now, I'm really committed to AI. We've put our whole company behind Galileo, and Galileo has been an extremely successful rollout here.
[00:17:36] Speaker B: But there's a really interesting dialogue going.
[00:17:38] Speaker A: On about whether AI is paying off.
[00:17:42] Speaker B: Now, last week, I wrote an article.
[00:17:43] Speaker A: And did a podcast on the layoffs.
[00:17:47] Speaker B: At Intuit and UKG. And in both cases, the CEO's basically.
[00:17:51] Speaker A: Stated that the reason we're laying people off and the reason that we're improving or tightening the performance management is because we need the money to buy all this AI. Well, that's a real issue because there.
[00:18:04] Speaker B: Was also a very interesting article about Chevron with the CIO of Chevron, stating.
[00:18:11] Speaker A: That they purchased, or maybe they, I don't know if they paid for it.
[00:18:15] Speaker B: 20,000 licenses of the Microsoft copilot, which, by the way, costs $30 a month per employee.
[00:18:21] Speaker A: So that's a lot of money. And said that the jury is out.
[00:18:24] Speaker B: Whether it's really improved productivity at Chevron.
[00:18:28] Speaker A: Now, I think this is true everywhere.
[00:18:31] Speaker B: We are somewhat fascinated with this technology.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: Because it is so amazing, but it's not clear what return we're getting on it yet as a society right now.
[00:18:44] Speaker B: Roughly a trillion dollars or more has.
[00:18:47] Speaker A: Been invested in, and this is capital investment in the infrastructure, simply using Nvidia and servers, forget about the human infrastructure.
[00:18:57] Speaker B: To enable us to use AI.
[00:18:59] Speaker A: And so two studies came out, one by MIT, another one by Goldman Sachs, which I'll link to, are somewhat skeptical.
[00:19:06] Speaker B: About when the ROI will take place from AI. The reason I bring this up to.
[00:19:11] Speaker A: You is I'm working with all the.
[00:19:15] Speaker B: Vendors, and most of the vendors are.
[00:19:18] Speaker A: Promoting AI as a must have technology, and they're highlighting use cases and examples and snazzy interfaces and so forth.
[00:19:30] Speaker B: None of them, not a single one.
[00:19:33] Speaker A: Is really promoting financial ROI of any of these tools.
[00:19:37] Speaker B: And that's not because they're not valuable and useful. They are.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: I think AI does things that you simply cannot do manually, but because we don't know the ROI yet. So as you go out and look at tools, including Galileo, I think you.
[00:19:54] Speaker B: Need to ask yourself, what is this thing going to do that we can't do today?
[00:19:59] Speaker A: Now, I know from our use cases.
[00:20:01] Speaker B: And we have a lot of use cases with clients.
[00:20:04] Speaker A: There are three fundamental rois that we've seen with Galileo.
[00:20:09] Speaker B: And one of the reasons Galileo is.
[00:20:10] Speaker A: Different from the Microsoft copilot is the corpus.
[00:20:14] Speaker B: It's a very refined, highly trained, authoritative corpus.
[00:20:17] Speaker A: It isn't a generic LLM number. One is time saving. We have heard multiple times from people that once they have Galileo, they are saving half an hour to an hour a day of searching for things, checking things, finding things.
[00:20:36] Speaker B: By the way, if you load your own content into Galileo, it will obviously.
[00:20:40] Speaker A: Be able to help you with that, too.
[00:20:42] Speaker B: That is our use case here in our company.
[00:20:45] Speaker A: We all use it now. And rather than searching around for a.
[00:20:48] Speaker B: Piece of research or searching around for.
[00:20:50] Speaker A: A statistic, we can find it in.
[00:20:52] Speaker B: A few seconds with Galileo in a narrative form without having to read through.
[00:20:56] Speaker A: A document to find the content that we're looking for. The second is doing things that we couldn't do before. Now we have a really interesting use case that just came through last week from a client that's trying to build a systemic operating model for their talent function. I'm actually working with some companies this week on systemic operating models for their talent acquisition.
And, you know, you can read our.
[00:21:23] Speaker B: Reports and you can look at the case studies and you can talk to.
[00:21:25] Speaker A: Us, but then you're going to have.
[00:21:27] Speaker B: To sit down and take that information and apply it to your company. So she literally asked Galileo to give her. She listed the functions in her HR.
[00:21:38] Speaker A: Department by name and capability, and then she asked Galileo to organize them around a systemic operating model, what is the most logical way to organize them? And it actually developed exactly the four tier model that we have in the systemic HR operating model for her with her particular functions in it.
[00:21:58] Speaker B: I don't know if she would have been able to do that by herself. She might have if she had worked with us, or she may not have.
So there's that.
[00:22:05] Speaker A: Another example is a company that is.
[00:22:08] Speaker B: Using our new skills data from litecast.
[00:22:11] Speaker A: To build behavioral assessments for recruiting that.
[00:22:15] Speaker B: Are far more detailed and far more useful and actionable than they had in the past.
[00:22:20] Speaker A: So they're redoing their recruiting process in.
[00:22:23] Speaker B: A way that they didn't know how to do before.
[00:22:24] Speaker A: They could have hired a consultant, but.
[00:22:26] Speaker B: They don't need to because Galileo is a consultant. So that's the second use case.
[00:22:31] Speaker A: The third use case is learning.
[00:22:34] Speaker B: And learning is a little bit of an intangible ROI.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: But if you as a user or your employees, can learn something faster or.
[00:22:46] Speaker B: Learn something they wouldn't have learned without.
[00:22:48] Speaker A: The AI, the return on investment of.
[00:22:50] Speaker B: That is very, very high because they.
[00:22:53] Speaker A: Will prevent mistakes, they will make better decisions, they will feel more confident, they will feel more engaged with your company and so forth.
[00:23:02] Speaker B: And what's wonderful about Galileo and other.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: AI's in particular, I'm just talking about the one we use, is that, you.
[00:23:09] Speaker B: Know, many, many things we do in HR are very confusing or abstract or arcane.
[00:23:14] Speaker A: They have, you know, strange words and names associated with Dei is a perfect example. I mean, there's a thousand people talking about different issues with Dei. And so sometimes you just want to know, I want to understand what this is.
[00:23:26] Speaker B: Give me examples. How do I do it? What works?
[00:23:29] Speaker A: What doesn't work, what research has been done on this topic?
[00:23:33] Speaker B: Before I launch into some solution or answer some question from some employee or.
[00:23:38] Speaker A: Manager, Galileo is really good at that.
[00:23:41] Speaker B: And as we put more of our.
[00:23:42] Speaker A: Academy content into it, it's not only going to answer questions, but it'll draw.
[00:23:47] Speaker B: Pictures and show you videos and do.
[00:23:49] Speaker A: All sorts of instructional things. I mean, I think there's a. And I spoke with the head of the L and D group in Ireland a week ago. The fine line between problem solving and learning.
[00:24:04] Speaker B: When you try to solve a problem.
[00:24:06] Speaker A: You'Re learning in order to solve the problem.
You don't oftentimes learn just for the sake of learning. That's what workflow or workplace learning is. It's learning for a purpose, not learning for academic interests, although there's still some academic interest, too. So an LLM or a well trained system like ours will teach you things.
[00:24:28] Speaker B: That you kind of needed to know, but maybe you didn't need to know, didn't know that you needed to know.
[00:24:33] Speaker A: Them in a whole variety of forms. And the learning industry is getting there.
[00:24:38] Speaker B: Other platforms are coming along.
[00:24:40] Speaker A: And so that's the Roi to me. So take a look at the Goldman Sachs report I'm linking to and you'll see what I'm talking about. The reason I bring that up is that the cost of these things could.
[00:24:52] Speaker B: Be high in some cases, the cost of implementing a custom AI solution.
[00:24:56] Speaker A: So there's going to be some pushback from some of you, particularly if you work in software companies, on how much money you spent on these things.
[00:25:04] Speaker B: We are not going to be charging.
[00:25:05] Speaker A: A lot for Galileo.
[00:25:06] Speaker B: We're not.
[00:25:07] Speaker A: It's actually embedded into our membership, so.
[00:25:09] Speaker B: You'Ll be able to get Galileo for.
[00:25:10] Speaker A: A very modest cost given the return on investment we've seen. Okay, so a little bit of sensitive topics today. You know, think hard about Dei and the word equity and fairness and pay equity, and, you know, ask Galileo for advice and Galileo will help you try to bring up this topic of civility. If you feel like it's a topic in your company, really, really feel strongly about that and then keep digging into AI.
[00:25:37] Speaker B: We are launching a whole bunch of.
[00:25:39] Speaker A: New courses on AI.
[00:25:40] Speaker B: In some sense, the Jbar academy is an AI academy.
[00:25:43] Speaker A: I mean, there's just dozens and dozens of courses and research and conversations and case studies about AI in there because it's going to be a big issue in the future for all of us.
[00:25:54] Speaker B: Okay, have a great weekend, everyone.
[00:25:56] Speaker A: Talk to you again next week.
