In our debut month, HR Brew is asking the question “Where are we?” with stories that explore where we, employees and HR professionals, are physically working at this point in the pandemic, as well as where we are metaphorically, as the industry sees rapid growth while confronting enormous challenges. Our next story, from Sam Blum, checks in on where HR diversity initiatives are at.

Like the Bat-Signal hanging low in the nighttime sky over Gotham, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion [DE&I] consultants have been summoned by corporate America to rescue the working world from generations of racial and gender inequality.

The past 19 months have reportedly been a boom time for the DE&I consultant industrial complex, but even before the civil unrest of 2020, workers and experts alike have leveled accusations that the industry promotes diversity for optics.

Various experts in the field told HR Brew that consultants can help, but only if the consulting is supported by a historical and philosophical perspective: that the task of enacting tangible change in the private sector is inseparable from the centuries-old struggle to achieve racial and gender equality in the United States.

Diversity Theater? Corporate diversity—and the calls for it inside offices and the legislative arena—is nothing new. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 established wage parity for men and women, while employment discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex, and national origin” was outlawed by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Fast forward to today, and those once-historic gains now seem meager: Out of the 1,800 CEOs who’ve led Fortune 500 companies since 1955, only 19 have been Black.

Enter the consultants, who offer an outsider’s perspective that can, in theory, overhaul an organization suffering from a lack of racial diversity via anti-bias training and what many call a “strategic vision” for implementing true DE&I. Some critics say these consultants have been largely ineffective.

“There’s this huge diversity apparatus that has sprung up that doesn’t work, and that institutions are spending billions of dollars on every year,” Pamela Newkirk, the author of Diversity, Inc., a book about DE&I consulting, told HR Brew.

Understand the origin story: Torin Perez, a DE&I consultant and speaker, explained that organizational efforts must be grounded in a historical perspective to actually enact change. Perez said many organizations “are lacking the larger origination story, they’re lacking the larger context of why we even have DE&I initiatives in the first place. It’s grounded in human value...striving for a more just world.”

Putting words into action: Achieving success on this front is hard, but there is a practical approach: allocating real resources for DE&I, and calculating and tracking the ROI. According to a recent SmartRecruiters study, just 32% of companies around the world “report having a budget for diversity sourcing that aligns with their diversity hiring objectives.”

Isa Notermans, who was formerly the head of diversity and belonging at Spotify and is now the head of people and culture at Linktree, said compensating those who run Employee Resource Groups could be a feasible place to start: “Look at that from an equity perspective, and think about expanding opportunities” for employees who do this extra work.

Click here to read the full story.—SB

Additional reporting by John Del Signore.

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Contact Sam Blum via the encrypted messaging apps Signal and Telegram (@SamBlum_Brew) or simply email [email protected].

The promise of a long weekend gets most of us giddier than a PSL, Target run, and sweater weather combined (what? We’re pumped for fall). So it’s no surprise that employees are overwhelmingly in favor of making every weekend a long weekend. And according to an exclusive survey conducted by Harris Poll for HR Brew, most employed Americans are so eager to elongate their weekends that they’re willing to put more hours into a four-day work week.

Could the four-day work week be the ultimate employee retention strategy? Only one way to find out!

Trying to assess the perception and impact of HR policies can be a murky business. To make it easier, HR Brew partnered with Harris Poll to survey a representative sample of 1,089 employed Americans about hot topics in the workplace. Survey says:

• Four day for all. A large majority (83%) of American workers would be in favor of a four-day work week, and they’re willing to work longer hours to get an extra weekend day: 87% would put in more hours daily to get a four-day week. Most of them will not, however, accept pay cuts: 59% have no interest in four-day weeks if it means a smaller paycheck.
• Diversity? Idk. A startling finding: Only 13% of workers say their employers have taken a step to expand diversity initiatives. Nearly half report no effort to improve diversity (49%) and almost four in 10 workers have, frankly, no clue how leadership is addressing the problem (38%). If you’re an executive who’s spent serious cash on diversity initiatives, this isn’t what you want to hear. It points to a lack of internal communication about diversity policies and programs.
• Privacy, please. When it comes to trusting employers with data and handling workplace complaints, the younger folk split from their elders. Gen Z takes a hard pass on employee surveillance: They are less likely than any other age group to support monitoring employees’ behavior at work. Gen Z is about 20% less likely than millennials to favor employee surveillance techniques, including monitoring building access, social media activity, and internal communications.

Gen Z is also significantly more skeptical of HR’s ability to resolve harassment complaints: Only 52% trust HR to field harassment concerns. In contrast, 77% of employees in other age groups think HR is up to the job.

Zoom Out: In Covid times, worker attitudes change at the pace of viral TikTok challenges: Each day, there’s something new. But some numbers don’t seem so fleeting. According to these responses, there’s daylight between what HR’s doing to tackle diversity and what employees understand.

This matters, because Gen Z, who are already a flight risk, highly value diversity: According to data from Tallo, 87% of Gen Z considers DE&I at work “extremely important.” Without revamped communication, Gen Z won’t trust HR enough to stick around.

Click here to read the full story.—SV

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Contact Susanna Vogel via the encrypted messaging apps Signal and Telegram (@SusannaVogel) or simply email [email protected].

Everyone loves insurance providers—they pay out claims without question, never try to drown suffering people in red tape, and are renowned for putting people ahead of profits! But it seems that when it comes to long-haul Covid—and we do hope you’re sitting down—some providers are playing hardball.

We feel so disillusioned, but it seems that some insurance companies are denying long-Covid claims, leaving it up to HR departments to consider other ways to protect their workers.

Zoom in: Disability law firm Kantor & Kantor received so many inquiries about Covid insurance claims that it created a free guidebook addressing long-Covid claim denials.

• If the firm’s experience is any indication, the tsunami of long-Covid claims is here, and it’s slamming into a seawall of rejections from insurance providers.
• Attorney Andrew Kantor says the rejections are strategic and expected: “Insurers are incentivised to deny righteous claims because there is very little risk to doing so.”

Covid-19 is a particularly difficult claim to make, because approval requires a clear diagnosis and an equally clear list of limitations and restrictions caused by the condition. Long Covid is a new disease characterized by chaos, not clarity.

What can HR do? To address the long-Covid insurance issue, an estimated one-third of US companies have created new and separate Covid-19 leave policies, according to a study by Guardian Life. Other companies are working entirely outside their benefit packages to assist.

One such company is Gotham Technologies Group, a small technology consulting firm based out of New Jersey. CTO and co-owner Kenneth Phelan first heard about long Covid from a direct report whose brother suffered from it.

After learning that the man’s disability claim was being held up by the insurance provider, Phelan decided to make sure his company was prepared to help employees with an affliction that is more common than he had realized. Phelan said he pressed leadership to assess individuals’ disability needs on a person-by-person basis—he acknowledged there is more legal risk to making benefit decisions at the individual level, but ultimately decided it was worth it.

“Working with the insurance companies gets frustrating—they’re asking for diagnostic codes [to approve funding] and are overly concerned with precedence. They can’t get anything approved,” he explained. “So we’re working outside those systems. Instead of asking the companies what’s approved, we are asking our people, ‘What do you need?’”

Click here to read the full story.—SV

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Contact Susanna Vogel via the encrypted messaging apps Signal and Telegram (@SusannaVogel) or simply email [email protected].

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: 36% of HR leaders who participated in a worldwide survey on HR trends say they struggle to hold their company’s leadership accountable for DE&I outcomes. (Gartner)

Quote: “I quit my job back in July 2021 after months of consideration because I’d realized (in large part due to the pandemic) that life is too short to spend eight hours of your day, five days a week doing something that doesn’t fulfill you. My job wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t meaningful. I didn’t feel like I was adding any value to the world or making the kind of positive impact that I knew, deep down, I really wanted to make.” (From Buzzfeed’s “23 People Explained Their Decision to Leave Their Workplaces, and It’s Incredibly Eye-Opening and Horrifying”)

Read: The authors of a new study on gender pay inequity explain how systemic workplace biases result in men getting more opportunities to manage bigger teams for higher pay. (WSJ)

Catch up on the top HR Brew stories from the past few editions:

Vaccine protocols: You’ve got one shot at building employee trust

Where does burnout actually come from? A former professor has answers

What you need to know about OSHA, the little agency in charge of major workplace regulations