5 Takeaways From The Jobs For the Future Impact Employer Summit

Photo Credit: Jobs For the Future (JFF)

“What was your first job?” I love that question, so it’s the opening question I ask every guest on The Edge of Work podcast. After 100+ episodes, I’ve heard everything from servers to paper delivery specialists, cake decorators, camp counselors, babysitters, and retail associates.

That question was also the opening icebreaker at the Impact Employer Summit, an annual event hosted by Jobs for the Future (JFF). The summit was for leaders representing 65 companies employing eight million people and brought them together to learn, connect, and share how they or their company can achieve a more equitable, inclusive economic future.

Everyone has different reasons for choosing their careers, but everyone benefits when we create systems that enable quality jobs and careers where people can maximize their talent.

If we want to create a better, more equitable world of work, we must build new ways of thinking and working. The rest of the summit gave me a taste of how leaders and companies are advancing in this critical moment. Here are some takeaways from the event.

1. The new era of work should work for everyone

In her opening remarks, Cat Ward, VP for Employee Mobilization at JFF, shared statistics about prosperity and opportunity in the United States over the past three decades. Despite improvements in unemployment, savings rates, and educational attainment, many individuals, especially those traditionally underserved or marginalized, have not benefited like others.

These challenges are not new, but their solutions should be. Ward encouraged us to think systematically about creating new practices and systems that work for everyone. To illustrate her point, Ward shared JFF’s North Star: 75 million people facing systemic barriers to advancement will work in quality jobs.

“We can’t get to that goal by using past playbooks or thinking on the fringes. We need to think differently and systemically,” Ward added. Ward’s call to action reminds me of one of my favorite Albert Einstein quotes: “You can’t use an old map to explore a new world.” In this challenging time, as we think about the new world of work we want to create, we must ensure it works for everyone.

Systemic problems aren’t solved independently; they require strategy, listening, coalition building, individual contribution, and collective action. Ward reminded us, “People create systems, and we can create new ones.”

2.We’ve made progress but have to keep going

Throughout the day, we heard from leaders from Impact Employers about the talent practices they were implementing, including skills-based hiring, leveraging diverse talent models for hiring applicants, work-based learning, and career pathways. These are positive steps forward, but we must keep going.

Be it challenging macroeconomic conditions, political challenges, or pushback around diversity, equity, and inclusive workplaces, genuine challenges make well-intentioned efforts difficult and cumbersome. It can feel like pushing a boulder up a hill. Aneesh Raman, Chief Economic Opportunity Officer at LinkedIn, reminded us that maybe that is the point. In his opening remarks, Aneesh shared a simple but poignant quote from his time working under the Obama Administration: “Hard things are hard.”

Driving changes to structured systems isn’t easy. If it were, it would have already happened. In some ways, the fact that it is hard is the point. Raman encouraged leaders to “handle hard better” by balancing short-term pressures with the longer-term vision.

The afternoon session was a great example of how to handle hard peer-to-peer consulting. During the afternoon, we discussed with peers our most significant challenges and got support and ideas on progressing against them. People gave feedback and discussed topics ranging from “How do I build a more diverse pipeline of talent into our profession?” and “How do we encourage mindset shifts in hiring managers?” to “How do we encourage hiring managers to explore alternative talent pools?” Complex problems require diverse solutions, and when we face hard things, we must continue to turn toward others, not away from them.

3.Scaling talent programs and initiatives means collaborating strategically and systemically

In 2024, many organizations will adopt employer impact practices like skills-based hiring, internal mobility, career pathways development, and ethical offboarding. While some of these initiatives are not new, what’s become more apparent is the importance of threading these practices across the organization strategically and systemically.

All ideas and initiatives start somewhere, and it makes sense to focus on small pilots or focused initiatives to build momentum and gain traction. But at some point, to maximize impact and drive business outcomes, talent practices must be designed holistically and strategically with critical teams, business units, and stakeholders inside and outside the organization.

A diversity and inclusion leader mentioned many “pockets of goodness” around talent initiatives, such as skills-based hiring, to improve critical outcomes in her organization. But she cautioned that while that was a great start, they needed to focus on finding ways to integrate initiatives across teams and silos to scale the collective impact. These initiatives impact something everyone in the organization cares about, talent. Thus, to maximize the effect, we must be intentional and systemic with whom we collaborate.

Another leader spoke about bringing others on the journey with you and inviting and encouraging their participation. When discussing programs for creating a culture of inclusion, they focused on ways to invite others to participate versus traditional methods of compliance and making things mandatory. “It is an invitation, not an imposition,” they shared. As a result, participation and engagement rates in programs for key population groups (e.g., managers and leaders) skyrocketed.

As many speakers mentioned, the key is to work in partnership and be more inclusive with cross-functional stakeholders inside HR and within the broader organization. Instead of looking at our work in a silo, we must proactively reach across the organization, and in some cases, outside the organization, to get support and feedback and invite other stakeholders to join us to achieve shared goals.

4. Developing equitable talent programs requires listening to understand

In their updated Impact Employer Model, JFF developed a list of over 100 equitable talent management practices that employers can create to build fairer talent systems. There are numerous ideas and initiatives for starting your journey. But getting started and scaling this work doesn’t only require taking the initiative and moving quickly; it also requires actively listening to the individuals directly and indirectly impacted by the programs, policies, and protocols you are building. Not empathy for the sake of empathy, but truly listening to understand.

It may sound foundational or simple, but simple doesn’t always mean easy, and even well-intentioned efforts can sometimes go off course. However, doing this right can lead to better outcomes.

For example, during a session on employee voice, one leader shared their organization’s journey and collaboration with their front-line workers as they iterated and evolved their work model during the pandemic. While they traditionally used tools like employee focus groups and surveys, they went further and developed a model of listening to employee feedback and acting on it.

They created an “Ask, Action, Evolve” model and worked with leaders to ensure they understood how to take feedback and act upon it. As this program scaled, they built an expectation that leaders would ask for feedback and share how they processed it and acted upon it to ensure employees were heard. Now, they are evolving their efforts and have piloted feedback gathering during shifts.

5.We All Must Embrace Being Developers of Talent

One of my favorite quotes of the day came from a panelists who talked about career mobility.

“We talk about going and hiring the best and brightest talent, but are we giving those people the best and brightest managers and leaders?”

This quote resonated with me because I spend a lot of time working with organizations to develop talent. We can create more equitable pathways into organizations for people and design good-quality jobs. But none of us live in a silo, and none of us can be successful on our own. We want to unlock the potential and possibilities of every worker. So, we must create organizations where managers and leaders are tasked and held accountable for being developers of talent. We achieve this by finding new and diverse ways to attract and onboard talent and implementing systems and practices to develop that talent and enable them to put their skills to use.

Several organizations shared ideas about how they were implementing this system. For example, a leading professional services firm makes developing talent part of its promotion criteria for senior leaders. Other leaders spoke about providing training and resources to support managers’ investments in their people’s development.

My favorite highlight was an interview with a young employee who started as a cashier at a restaurant and became a restaurant manager trainer and a top-performing manager at their organization. It showcased how, as a leader, developing your people leads to improved performance and personal growth. A typical quote in this line of work is that “talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not.” One way we can create better outcomes is to invest in developing the people before us and making talent development a critical competency of every leader.

 

The Time Is Now to “Be Brave”

Returning to the opening night icebreaker question, “What was your first job?”—my first job as a teenager was as a caddie at a golf course. It was arguably the best job I’ve had outside of my job today. As a shy teenager, that job taught me to talk to others, show up on time, and become a responsible professional.

Fast forward to today, where I’ve talked with thousands of leaders about their jobs and spend most of my days working with organizations to help them develop leaders who develop their people. Looking closely, you can see how a good job gave a quiet teenager the confidence, capacity, and opportunity to have a rewarding and meaningful career. Selfishly, I’m committed to these efforts because I know their impact on me, and I want to create a world of work where all people have access to them.

While your journey might differ from mine, you probably know what it’s like to have a good-quality job—my question is, wouldn’t you want that for others?

In her opening keynote address at the Horizons Summit, JFF CEO Maria Flynn challenged us to “Be Brave.” In these uncertain and challenging times, we need to keep going, stick to our commitments, and keep doing the hard things toward building a better world of work that works for all people.

Challenge and possibility are two sides of the same coin. During these times, we can envision and build a better world of work. Now is the time to “Be Brave” and create new systems that generate quality jobs and economic mobility for all people.

For more on Jobs For the Future (JFF), check out my conversations with Cat Ward, and Megha Bansal Rizoli.