Elevating Business Through Ethics: Building Trust and Engagement

Recently, I had the honor of speaking at the Elevate HR conference organized by Merit HR in the San Francisco Bay area, where the insights that I shared about HR’s potential role in crafting a culture of ethical leadership within organizations were positively received. This has inspired me to pen a blog on the same subject. In a landscape often dominated by the pursuit of profit, injecting humanity and ethical considerations into the business equation is our navigational tool for upright conduct. Such an approach goes beyond just being agreeable—it is fundamental for nurturing a vibrant community and a resilient environment. For those at the helm of HR, it involves advocating for practices that respect the inherent worth of individuals and the collective prosperity of all stakeholders involved.

Here’s how applying Six Lenses of Ethics, as identified by the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, can transform an organization’s culture and leadership and build trust and engagement among its people and stakeholders:

1. Rights Lens: Develop an organizational “Humanity Charter” that actively recognizes and safeguards each employee’s rights and liberties. Regularly reassess HR policies for alignment with this charter and train management to embody these principles in daily operations and interactions.

2. Justice Lens: Form a “Justice Advisory Committee” that reflects employee diversity to provide perspectives on the fairness of company policies. This group should monitor the fair allocation of resources and ensure unbiased recognition and grievance resolution, based on both merit and necessity.

3. Utilitarian Lens: Embrace a “Holistic Impact Assessment” process. Decision-making should weigh the consequences for the corporation, the community, and the environment. Analyze impacts on employee well-being, community health, and environmental stability to ensure a comprehensive view informs corporate choices.

4. Common Good Lens: Initiate “Sustainability Circles” for employees to engage in projects aimed at the common good, like environmental conservation or community education. This cultivates a sense of purpose beyond the company walls and fosters activities that benefit the whole ecosystem.

5. Virtue Lens: Promote a “Virtue-Based Leadership” paradigm that esteems and rewards behaviors that reflect virtues such as empathy, accountability, and respect. Leadership mentorship programs are particularly beneficial in nurturing these virtues by setting an example for others to follow.

6. Care Ethics Lens: Adopt “Care-Based Conflict Resolution” methods that give precedence to empathy and understanding when resolving workplace disputes. This technique strives for resolutions that are both compassionate and constructive, with an emphasis on relational and emotional aspects.

Infusing these ethical lenses into the essence of corporate ethos not only preserves moral standards but also fosters a vision of commerce that is intrinsically human. A business that is conscious of its place within society’s fabric and acts with responsibility towards the environment establishes a new benchmark for success—one that is quantified not merely by financial gain, but by social and ecological well-being.

Additionally, operating with integrity cultivates employee trust and engagement. When staff members see that their company does not just talk about ethical practices but actually embodies them, it builds a foundation of trust. Trust leads to increased loyalty, lower turnover, and a more engaged workforce, as employees feel secure in an environment that values fairness and respect. Moreover, an ethical reputation can attract top talent, create stronger community ties, and potentially lead to more sustainable business growth. This is the dawn of a new era in business, where the core values of humanity and ethical integrity are the cornerstone of innovation and affluence.

How to Attract, Develop, and Maintain Generationally Diverse Talent

With a growing population and more employees postponing retirement, for the first time ever, 5 different generations are represented in the workforce: Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z. Naturally, employees from different generations come to work with different values, shaped by the times in which they’ve lived and worked. They bring with them a diversity of perspectives and experiences.

However, in our fast-paced society, quick advancements in technology and culture have created significant generational divisions. To overcome these challenges and foster a thriving, age-diverse workforce, organizations must implement a multipronged approach that considers generational issues relevant to the workplace and adjusts accordingly to engage with employees of different backgrounds.

Still, we must acknowledge that every employee has a unique history of their own. Understanding and welcoming differences across generations requires some thinking outside the box too.

The 5 Generations That Make Up Our Workforce

Below is a brief look at each of these 5 generations and their common traits, as identified by generational expert Dr. Bea Bourne, DM.

Traditionalists (born 1925 – 1945)
- Motivated by respect, recognition, and providing long-term value to their company.
- Prefer in-person communication and handwritten notes to digital communication.

Baby Boomers (born 1946 – 1964)
- Motivated by loyalty to their company, teamwork, and strong sense of duty.
- Prefer whatever style of communication is most efficient, including face-to-face conversation or phone calls.

Gen X (born 1965 – 1980)
- Motivated by diversity, even work-life balance, and their personal interests.
- Like Baby Boomers, Gen X values efficiency and is comfortable communicating face-to-face or by phone. Gen X is generally tech-savvy as well.

Millennials (born 1981 – 1997)
- Motivated by responsibility, meaningful relationships with their team, and opportunity for unique work experiences.
- Prefer to communicate digitally through IMs, texts, and emails.
- In 2016, Millennials became the largest generational cohort in the labor force.

Gen Z (born after 1997)
- Motivated by diversity, personalization, individuality, and creativity.
- Like Millennials, Gen Z prefers to communicate digitally through IMs, texts, and emails.

With an understanding of these generational differences, how can you engage best and most effectively with your employees? How can you attract, develop, and maintain generationally diverse talent?

Attracting Talent

To recruit a multi-generational pool of applicants, expand your company’s reach. While Millennials and Gen Z job seekers frequently consult social media and online job boards for employment opportunities, older generations may not be as familiar with these resources. To cast a wider net and provide equal opportunity to talent of all ages, look for candidates in a variety of places, including traditional job boards and community networking events.

Additionally, when assembling job descriptions and benefits packages, consider the different standards each generation may expect in regard to flexibility, work-life harmony, and compensation. Stay up to date on current trends and ensure your benefits reflect the needs of people in every stage of life. Determine what your company can offer in regard to educational and development allowances, parental leave, and retirement planning.

When assessing candidates, keep potential generational differences in mind, especially during the interview process. Inevitably, you’ll observe differences between what Baby Boomers and Millennials think is important to highlight on a resume, or what values they seek in their workplace. While setting interviews, consider each individual’s comfortability with different interview styles, including phone, video conference, and in-person. You may find that older candidates are less comfortable video conferencing and favor interviewing in-person, or that they became well-acquainted with Zoom during the pandemic and prefer it. Don’t make assumptions about the so-called “digital natives” of younger generations either; researchers recently identified Gen Z’s unexpected preference for in-person communication. Cultivate confidence amongst candidates of all ages on an individual basis so best decisions can be made in the hiring process.

Developing Talent

Generational factors can also influence how we process information and learn. When first joining your team, you may find younger employees prefer self-paced, self-service training, while Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, and Gen X lean toward a more structured, guided approach. While self-paced training may seem most convenient for your organization, take the time to incorporate methods that serve a variety of learning and processing styles.

Age diversity doesn’t only present obstacles to overcome. Cross-generational collaboration and mentorship opportunities can provide valuable experiences for employees – younger employees benefit from the wisdom and skills of their older peers while offering older employees a valuable new perspective of their own.

Maintaining Talent

Every employee should feel a sense of belonging and investment in their role and within their company. How can managers gauge these sentiments amongst their teams? Indications of goal-setting are a hopeful place to start. (Remember, the professional goals of Traditionalists and Baby Boomers preparing for retirement likely look very different than those of Gen Z employees first entering the workforce.)

There is no catch-all solution to retaining employees, but your general approach can be simple. What keeps people engaged and happy at work? For Gen Z employees who have only experienced an uncertain job market, it may be a solid development plan with a clear career path. For Gen X and Millennials in their mid-career and mid-life, it may be enhancing the workplace flexibility introduced during the pandemic and sometimes necessitated by our heavy cultural mood. For Baby Boomers and Traditionalists whose hard-working nature deters them from retirement, it may be providing rewards for their loyalty and recognition of their expertise.

If there is an ongoing disconnect or conflict and you’re struggling to understand its cause, try considering things from a generational perspective. Is an employee being asked to compromise their generational values? How might the employee’s lived experiences influence their behavior or perspective at work? What type of communication is this employee most receptive to and familiar with? Considering generational perspective will help you build stronger, lasting relationships with your employees while nurturing the success of your generationally-diverse organization.

A Different Approach to Company Values: Start with the Individual

All too often, company values are just words on a website or a poster on the wall which were decided by the people at the top and are expected to trickle down into the behavior of each team and each individual. When this top-down approach is taken, company values don’t always connect with individuals on a personal level, and therefore, they aren’t easily actualized in the workplace. So, how do we get individuals to truly connect with organizational values? Work to integrate values from the other direction – upward. This means starting with the individual and their own values and setting them up to successfully connect those values to their work in a meaningful way. In this blog, we will discuss DILAN’s unique process of providing a space to accomplish this alignment of personal, team, and company values.

Understanding Shifting Values in the Workplace
Values help create a sense of purpose for employees, in their work and personal lives. Being able to clarify and articulate a personal set of values allows employees to connect more meaningfully to their work bringing more intentionality to their contributions. But what happens when people’s values change? Research supports that individual values can shift and change as people move through their life cycle and adjust to challenging environments, and after a turbulent last few years, many employees have experienced a shift in what matters most to them–maybe that’s their health, their family, their sense of stability. Whatever changes in values they’ve experienced, they are now left trying to find ways to accommodate this new shift in values in the workplace.

If we want to create an environment where employees are engaged and find meaning in what they do, we have to prioritize the alignment of values as we come out of a hectic few years and move forward into the future.

How can you do this effectively in an organizational setting?

Facilitate an opportunity for employees to identify what has shifted in their personal values. This will help provide clarity and understanding around how to connect their new values to their work. Setting aside time to refresh and renew your team’s values will help deepen their sense of purpose in their work.

How to Align Personal Values with Team and Company Values

Step 1: Have people identify and acknowledge their own values
First, it’s important to create space for your employees to clarify their own personal values. They may have a strong sense that their values have shifted over the past few years, but they may not have ever vocalized or organized these thoughts.

DILAN uses a technique called Values Edge 2.0 to help align personal and team values by having team members sort through a core group of 56 values and identify 15 core values. These core values should clearly reflect their personal choices and actions. Once these are identified, they are then challenged to sort the 15 core values into a ranked pyramid to give them a solid understanding for making personal decisions. A thorough understanding of their own values is the foundation for bringing values to life at work.

Step 2: Identifying team values
Once team members have identified and ranked their own personal values, they can choose which they want to bring forward into the workplace. Take time together to identify a core group of 6-10 team values based on the individual ones that overlap. As a team, which values do you want to focus on? Which can you commit to prioritizing together?

This will help guide and clarify how team members will behave and will bring a sense of shared alignment about what will guide the team’s efforts moving forward. Even just discussing these values and determining together which will influence team behaviors will help your team feel a sense of ownership and agency over the team culture and work.

Step 3: Translate these team values into behaviors
Once team values are identified, the team should determine together what it looks like, sounds like, and feels like when these team values are being upheld. Have discussions about the behaviors that demonstrate values like “respect,” “trust, or ”positivity” and create shared clarity and agreements about how people live out these values at work.

For example, if a team value is “positivity,” it may require that the team remove certain phrases from the workplace vocabulary like “this won’t work” or “I won’t be able to do that in time” and work to optimistically come up with solutions. Discussing clear, tangible ways to exhibit your team values deepens the connection between employees and helps unite the team around the values that actually matter to them. It’s also important to create a safe space for acknowledging when the values aren’t being actualized and for figuring out how everyone can improve together. This alignment creates a guide for making decisions and communicating with team members when faced with challenges.

Connecting to Organizational Values
Once your team has a good understanding of the values they are committed to upholding, you can help them identify how these values connect to the values of the organization. This creates a stronger connection to the overarching mission of the company and more tangible action steps to actually uphold the company’s values rather than just having them on a poster on the wall.

When there is a clear connection between an employee’s personal values, the team’s values, and the organizational values, you create a more cohesive company culture that results in more meaningful work.

Using Pronouns in The Workplace to Foster Inclusivity

For those who don’t have to worry about being misgendered, pronouns may not seem especially important. For those that have diverse gender identities, however, constantly being misgendered can feel exhausting and invalidating.

Imagine you’ve just spent the last hour getting ready for work, choosing an outfit that feels comfortable and represents who you are. On your commute, first the bus driver and then the barista misgender you and this happens again later in a meeting at the office. If you identify as a female, you are called sir. If you identify as male, you are called miss or ma’am. How might this make you feel? Do you correct them or let it go? Imagine having to think about this day in and day out.

Misgendering, unfortunately, happens often, and it can affect someone’s feelings of safety in the workplace. So, how can we create a more inclusive environment that makes people of all gender identities feel safe and welcome?

First, it’s important to acknowledge and respect diverse gender identities.

Traditional gender language privileges people who identify as binary, and until very recently, it has not successfully included those who identify differently. As we progress, it’s important to continue to be curious, to listen to how people are speaking, and to learn the language. Below are some key terms around gender to become familiar with.

Key Terms Explained

This list of terms is not comprehensive, but it’s a starting place to begin to understand different experiences of gender and how they may be expressed in the workplace.

Gender Identity: Who someone feels they are regardless of biological sex/sexual anatomy.
Gender Expression: How someone demonstrates who they are in terms of gender.
Gender Expansive: Someone whose experience and expression does not match up with expected societal norms. They may feel both a man and a woman, neither a man nor a woman or somewhere in between and this may or may not be fixed.
Cisgender: Someone whose gender identity and sex assigned at birth match.
Transgender: Someone whose gender identity does not correspond with their sex assigned at birth.
Non-binary: People who describe themselves and their genders as not fitting into set binary category of either male or female.

Pronouns & Their Rules

Pronouns are words that people use when referring to the gender of others—she/her, he/him or they/them. Some people use a combination like he/they or she/they, which may mean that they identify both ways, or it may be driven by context related to safety. If they don’t feel safe, they will opt to use the binary pronoun he or she.

The rules around the way we use pronouns in relation to other’s gender identities may feel like they are constantly changing as we all learn more, and this is ok. This just means that we need to pay attention and be mindful about the way we speak as the shift toward more and more inclusivity will take time.

Why Do Pronouns Matter in the Workplace?

Pronouns are used to reflect someone’s gender identity—a fundamental aspect of who a person is. Using a person’s name and their pronouns correctly is a form of respect and validation that should always be expressed in the workplace.

A recent study found 1.2 million people identify as nonbinary in US (the majority being under 29, white and live in urban areas). Additionally, according to Harvard Business Review:

More than 12% of U.S. millennials identify as transgender or gender non-conforming, and a majority believe that gender is a spectrum rather than a man/woman binary.”
In the U.S., 56% know someone who uses a gender neutral pronoun and 59% believe forms should include options other than “man” and “woman.”

This means that, in most workplaces, there is likely representation of diverse gender identities, and it’s important that, at work, we learn to talk about gender and use pronouns in a way that creates a sense of psychological safety for all employees. Getting misgendered can feel like one’s identity is being compromised, and if this happens over and over, it can take a huge emotional toll. At work, all levels of leadership should set examples for becoming allies to shift the culture toward inclusivity.

First Steps to Becoming an Ally at Work

To contribute to an environment of safety for all employees, each person has a part to play in respecting one another’s pronouns. Here are some easy ways you can be an ally in the workplace.

1. Make it easy for people to communicate their pronouns

It’s key to discover other’s pronouns so you can use them correctly. You can find out a person’s pronouns by introducing yourself with your own: “Hi, I’m Sam and my pronouns are she/her, what are yours?”

Now, this may be awkward at first, but the more we lead with this, the more it will feel natural. When asking for pronouns in a group setting, ask everyone at the table and be careful not to single anyone out.

Remember: how a person appears on the outside, does not necessarily reflect how they experience their gender. For those who use multi-pronoun like he/they, she/they: ask which pronoun the person would prefer you use to create communicate a sense of safety.

You can also make it easier for people to share their pronouns by placing your own pronouns in your email signature. The more people who do this, the more opportunity it creates for people to share their pronouns easily and comfortably.

2. Handle mistakes gracefully

It’s important to realize that you will likely make mistakes when using other people’s pronouns, and that’s okay as long as there is a commitment to improving.

When you make a mistake, apologize briefly and correct yourself, making a mental note about that person for the future. Be careful to not over apologize—when you do this, it puts extra spotlight on the person they may not want. The key is to always be respectful and commit to learning and getting better together.

3. Be curious without being intrusive

Curiosity can show you care about someone enough to get their pronouns right, but there is a distinction between being curious to learn and being intrusive or inappropriate at work.

If you’re unsure about someone’s pronouns, you can ask sensitively and let them take the lead in the conversation. If it seems like they don’t want to elaborate on their answer, don’t pry. If they begin to explain more about their pronouns, listen with humility and be willing to learn in the moment.

No matter your starting point along this journey, working toward more inclusivity will take a collective effort from your organization to make the workplace a welcoming, safe place that dignifies each individual person. The more we look to respect, validate, and include our colleagues, specifically those with diverse gender identities, the more human our business becomes.

Four Steps to Renegotiating Psychological Contracts with Employees

Originally written for and published by Forbes.com.

As we continue into the third year of living with the pandemic, most employers are aware that their employees are feeling burned out, overwhelmed and exhausted emotionally, mentally and physically. Employees and employers have been forced to deal with an immense amount of change during these past few years, from going remote to complete shifts in business strategy and overall direction.

This shifting work culture has felt unstable, to say the least, and it has shed more light on one specific area of the employee/employer relationship that in many cases has gone unaddressed for quite some time: the psychological contract.

The psychological contracts we hold with employees have likely been breached many times over, especially in the past few years, and this is extremely destabilizing for employees. As we reestablish what work looks like going forward, with new ways of connecting and future business priorities being established, we must consider renegotiating psychological contracts in the workplace to get back some of the stability that has eroded over the years.

What Is a Psychological Contract?

Originally coined by Denise Rousseau, a psychological contract is “an unwritten set of expectations between the employee and the employer. It includes informal arrangements, mutual beliefs, common ground and perceptions between the two parties.”

In other words, it’s an unofficial contract between employer and employee that determines much of the behavior seen in the workplace. It’s distinguishable from the written contract that an employee agrees to with their duties, pay rate, etc., and is more so the “fairness or balance” perceived by the employee around what they put into the job and how they are treated in return.

Below are a few examples of what a psychological contract may include:

Virtual meeting behavior (camera on or off)
How feedback is presented and how often
Overtime or travel expectations
Available development opportunities
Pay increase or promotion expectations
Work-life harmony prioritization
Transparency
Expectation to be treated with respect

These aspects, though not formally written in a contract, are typically understood between employer and employee based on informal conversions or commitments made by either party. When upheld, this mutually understood contract creates a sense of stability that can lead to employee retention and engagement. When there is uncertainty around the elements of the contract, however, and behavior outside the norm occurs, the contract is breached. If the psychological contract breach goes on for long periods of time without being addressed, employees will start to feel the ground beneath them waver, and feelings of resentment and frustration can easily start to emerge.

How Psychological Contracts Have Changed Over the Years

Technology and the digital age have changed many of the components of the psychological contract in the past decade — how work is accomplished, expectations around travel, meetings, office hours, etc. Most of these changes have occurred in line with society’s natural progress, making breaches in psychological contracts incremental and, possibly, harder to notice and/or perhaps easier to manage. However, over the past few years, new, major shifts have occurred at a rapid pace, making it difficult not to feel the effects of the breaches in the contract. Cue employee burnout.

Employee and employer expectations have drastically changed as a result of the pandemic, from hybrid and remote work to concerns around health and safety. With these changes in how we work and connect with one another, our employees’ sense of stability has become fragile. If we want to support our employees and ultimately see them succeed in the workplace, we must acknowledge that psychological contract breaches have been expedited, and we must shift to more sustainable expectations — an updated psychological contract.

How to Renegotiate a Psychological Contract

To bring back a sense of stability and help our employees feel less disoriented and more engaged, we can do four things regarding the psychological contracts we hold with them.

1. Be transparent and explicit. First, we must acknowledge that there is a psychological contract between the employer and employee. It can be helpful to define what it is if they are unaware and to not shy away from it. Psychological contracts are a normal, long-standing, working part of life and exist in many realms of our lives, and it’s okay to call them what they are. If your employees are clearly struggling with workplace expectations and staying engaged, set aside time to explicitly have this conversation.

2. Acknowledge where the contract has been breached. We must determine if we have breached the psychological contract with employees without knowing — or worse, without acknowledging it. This will look different for each employee, but it’s important you have a dialogue with them about their expectations that have gone unmet. Maybe it’s a string of layoffs that has left them worried about their job standing, an inability to give promised raises,

or a lack of work-life harmony being provided. Seek to understand each party’s part in the breach and work to create mutual understanding and respect for each other in these areas.

3. Set clear expectations moving forward. Whatever aspect of the psychological contract has been breached, engage in productive dialogue about why these things happened and how you intend to prevent them or adjust behavior in the future. It’s also important to establish a shared vision and objectives to ensure alignment going forward.

4. Agree on guiding principles. This is about how you will work to stay aligned and how you will communicate these unwritten expectations. You should mutually agree on a move-forward plan about how to check in about the validity of the contract and how it’s being upheld.

These psychological contract negotiations aren’t one-and-done. In fact, in order to avoid future employee burnout and increase employee buy-in long term, they should continuously flex with time and change with evolving circumstances. Renegotiating the psychological contract doesn’t have to be scary or taboo, but it ideally will instead become a normal part of the employee-employer relationship that has been missing for quite some time — a commitment between parties to communicate and adjust the terms of the psychological contract as circumstances and the workplace climate continue to change.

Include Mental Health Wellness in Your Return-to-Work Strategy

As COVID restrictions are being removed, many organizations are returning to the office. With the shift in how and where employees are working, there seems to be a heightened sense of anxiety about figuring out the new normal.

It’s safe to say that most people’s mental health has been tested over the past few years and that returning to the office brings new challenges and adjustments for all. After years of long hours on video conferencing platforms, little distinction between work and home life, and disheartening world events, many employees are feeling burned out and mentally drained. As we come back together, one of the new challenges that we face is that we have been conditioned to react negatively to cues that weren’t threatening before. For example, facemasks, someone coughing, people being in close physical proximity, and travel can all be triggering and threaten our sense of safety. With many people back in the office, it’s going to take time for people to remember that these triggers aren’t as threatening as they were at the height of the pandemic. Leaders need to be prepared that it may be a while before employees let their guard down again. As we get used to the new normal, there will be an adjustment period that may feel disorienting and cause stress to our teams.

For marginalized groups, the return to the workplace can be especially challenging. Those who experienced stress that was triggered by microaggressions or biases at work before the pandemic will be coming back to a vulnerable, potentially unsafe place in addition to dealing with all the mental stress that comes with returning to in-person work.

As we make this long-awaited transition, here are 3 ways your organizations can prioritize employees’ mental health:

1. Destigmatizing Mental Health

The number of workers who reported mental stress increased during the pandemic in 2022 jumped to 43% as compared to 38% in 2019. In the US and Canada, that number was higher: 57% of people reported workplace stress. To make employees return-to-work more manageable, it’s important to acknowledge that everyone’s mental health and well-being have been challenged. Here are a few ways your organization can help destigmatize mental health and promote caring for employees more holistically:

Including mental health support and resources in your organization’s wellness package
Providing days off when sensitive world events occur in order to provide extra support for those directly impacted
Providing well-being days off for mental recuperation once a month in order to make it easy for employees to participate fully on-the-job

2. Create Space for Marginalized Groups

For marginalized employees, a lack of feeling included may be an additional stressor when returning to in-person work. Neither biases nor microaggressions have gone away, and the thought of re-entering a workplace where marginalized employees may have to deal with these experiences again can add additional stress. After major events like social injustices, health inequities, and global conflict, the idea of inclusivity is top of mind for many, but it may not be felt or actualized in the day-to-day employee experience. For employees affected by this, going “back to normal” means feeling excluded and not feeling safe.

Organizations should not only be conscientious of these additional stressors, but they should also be intentional to ease these employees’ transitions. Ways to increase additional support include:

Creating or leveraging your existing Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) to help foster belonging and to give people a voice to offer recommendations on what would help them feel a sense of belonging as they return to the office
Creating or leveraging a mentorship program so that employees from marginalized groups can engage and get support from leaders, and ideally from leaders who are also a cultural match
Partnering with a mental health firm or bringing clinicians on-site who are a cultural match with your employees if additional support is needed

3. Provide Education to Empower Managers

On a team level, it’s every manager’s responsibility to support their team’s mental health and promote inclusion. However, these soft skills aren’t always talked about or taught, so managers must be provided with the proper education and training to assess when employees need additional support or when to intervene to reduce strained team dynamics. Here are some ways that managers can support their employees in this effort:

Finding educational opportunities to become more knowledgeable about mental health in the workplace
Articulating values and behavioral expectations for inclusion with your team
Modeling this behavior and holding those accountable who do not engage in this behavior
Look for nonverbal cues from your BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color), women, LGBTQIA, and other marginalized groups to determine if these individual contributors are feeling included and safe at work — are they disengaged or withdrawn from discussions? Is this behavior atypical for this employee?

To see a change in the way mental health affects us at work, mental health itself must be prioritized at every level of the organization: leaders, managers, and individual contributors. As we all look at the return to in-person work and at what stressors each person may be facing, we must integrate mental health wellness into the return-to-work strategy. The post-pandemic world calls for more acuity around mental health and how to manage and support it in the workplace. As we work together to make this a priority, we are reminded that Business is Human^®.

The 5 Generations That Make Up Our Workforce

Attracting Talent

Developing Talent

Maintaining Talent

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