This is the published version of Forbes' Future of Work newsletter, which offers the latest news for chief human resources officers and other talent managers on disruptive technologies, managing the workforce and trends in the remote work debate. Click here to get it delivered to your inbox every Monday!
Race issues—and diversity, equity and inclusion themes—have been big news this summer. A decision by the Society for Human Resource Management to drop the ‘E’ from its ‘DEI’ labeling was met with an online firestorm among HR professionals. Retailer Tractor Supply, responding quickly to pressure from a conservative activist, announced it was eliminating DEI roles, programs and goals from the company. Republican U.S. Representative Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) has referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as a “DEI hire,” and then last week, former President Donald Trump falsely questioned Harris’ racial identity, suggesting in an interview at a conference for Black journalists that she only “became a Black person” recently, prompting immediate bipartisan backlash.
The perceived divide over an issue that just four years ago was being loudly touted by seemingly every corporation in America—but now is getting more quiet support—suggests the conversation about DEI is shifting. In a survey released today of 3,000 workers by Seramount, a consulting and research firm, respondents said their support for DEI remains strong, with 76% saying they are personally committed to working on the issue in their workplace. But that figure is down from 83% in 2021, the survey shows.
“With all the headlines and all the conversations going on now around DEI backlash and ‘anti-woke,’ we were surprised it didn’t drop more,” says Laura Sherbin, Seramount’s managing director of consulting. “That was a lot of the reason we refielded the survey. We wanted to know how different we are as a nation for where we stand and what we stand up for.”
Meanwhile, other figures in the survey suggest a bit of progress: Black employees responded with a slightly improved view of their managers—70% said their manager is inclusive in 2024, compared with 65% in 2021—but fewer white employees say the same, falling from 74% in 2021 to 68% this year. The latter may suggest white employees are more attuned to workplace racism and equity now than they were before, Sherbin says.
She says that while employees remain largely committed to the issue, according to the survey, the firm’s practical experience is that employers are too, even if they’re making those commitments more quietly. “Many companies we have seen and observed are going underground, if you will, with their DEI activity, their DEI goals, their DEI mission. Most of them are still doing the work but the narrative around that has changed.” Yet “the greatest trap an organization can fall into around much of this is forgetting that silence is a position,” Sherbin says. “The lack of response is a response.”
You can find out more about Seramount’s findings here. Hope it’s a good week.
HUMAN CAPITAL
The Federal Reserve said Wednesday it would keep interest rates the same, but gave indications that economic data should soon support a rate cut, a welcome sign for borrowers and investors wanting rates to come down from their 23-year high. Then on Friday, the Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate rose from 4.1% to 4.3% in July, prompting market declines.
A Bloomberg investigation argues that the H-1B visa lottery—an annual drawing for a limited number of skilled-worker visas that are sought by tech giants, startups, banks and drugmakers—is “rigged.” The news organization obtained federal data that shows a kind of cheating known as “multiple registration,” a tactic of submitting more than one lottery entry for the same person. Bloomberg estimated that roughly one of every six visas awarded last year were obtained this way.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Target employees told Forbes’ Cyrus Farivar that its internal chatbot tool, “Help AI,” struggles to provide good answers, frustrates users and distracts workers. Farivar reported that the tool’s instructions for handling an active shooter differed from guidance suggested by the Department of Homeland Security. Company spokesperson Brian Harper-Tibaldo did not respond to questions about the active shooter guidance, Farivar reported, but said in a statement that the company is “committed” to making employee jobs easier as a way to “better serve our guests” and was open to feedback about the bot.
Tech companies with big AI investments have been driving the markets, but fortunes have flipped somewhat recently as Meta shares rose after the company exceeded analysts’ expectations in its second-quarter earnings report. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said investments in AI were starting to bear fruit, and the company’s net income in the second quarter climbed 73% to $13.47 billion. The rally comes after a negative reaction to Meta’s last earnings report in April, when Zuckerberg told investors to expect slower growth and big spending on the company’s AI projects. Meanwhile, Microsoft delivered strong earnings but reported slower growth in its AI business and cloud computing unit.
WHAT’S NEXT: KIERAN SNYDER
Kieran Snyder, the cofounder of software firm Textio, whose product helps address bias in workplace language, stepped back from the company’s CEO role earlier this year to focus on research and data about AI and workplace communication. One goal: Update a widely read report from 2014 about how high-performing men and women get performance feedback. Forbes spoke with Snyder about the updated research, as well as how AI is already having an impact on the performance review process. Excerpts from our conversation have been edited for length and clarity below.
What did you find in this study? And what has changed from the initial report 10 years ago?
[The first research] was much more narrow and focused. I was looking at high performers and gender very specifically. I collected a whole bunch of performance reviews from high-performing men and high-performing women and found that of the high-performing women, 76% had received some negative feedback, but only 2% of high-performing men had. That’s striking in the context of mostly positive reviews. I also found that 88% of the women received some kind of personality feedback, good or bad [rather than reviews of their performance]. Only 12% of the high-performing men had. The high-performing men consistently were getting feedback that was about their work, not their personality, and it was more positive in general.
Since that time, we’ve sliced much more data. We’ve brought in race and brought in age as well as gender. We’ve looked at different performance characteristics. … One thing I didn't look at 10 years ago was the difference between the high performers and everybody else. So I didn't know that high performers were receiving more feedback and more problematic feedback than other people.
I wasn’t super surprised that high performers get more feedback than everybody else. People invest more in them. But when you start looking at the details, the quality of what’s provided is quite low. There’s a lot of ‘great job, you knocked it out of the park’ or ‘you are always so awesome.’ When people receive meaningless, low quality feedback—even if it’s positive—they are much more likely to quit.
What are those numbers like now?
With high performers now, women receive 23% more [personality] feedback than the men. … It is the same distinction whether you’re talking high performers, middle performers or lower performers. … In 2014, it was closer to 70% more for women. The distinction has gotten narrower. Maybe it’s [changing because of] attention to the issue. I want to say maybe HR teams have invested a little bit more over the last decade in formalizing rubrics around performance assessment. Maybe HR has moved the needle a little bit on having structured evaluations.
Why is personality feedback a problem?
Personality feedback isn’t actionable. … [We know from previous research that] people quit when they receive observations about their personality or generic platitudes. If you give them something more specific and actionable, they tend to double down and stick with you. They feel recognized.
With feedback, the more recent the better. And then there’s just a core thing about clarity. When we were doing research last year [on ChatGPT and AI] one of the things that was so interesting was how when you asked ChatGPT to remove bias from performance feedback, it just makes [the review] sound more highfalutin. [ChatGPT] makes the vocabulary more advanced or removes contractions.
People do the same thing. When managers write for obscurity, it often is obscuring bias. They’re trying to make it sound science-y. Simplicity and clarity tend to be important differentiators of high quality versus low quality feedback.
That’s interesting about ChatGPT, because it seems like AI has the potential to help strip out bias that people put in reviews, too.
It starts with the provenance of the data set. The reason ChatGPT tries to remove bias by making something sound more formal, even though it is perpetuating all the same biases, is that’s what human beings typically do as well. If I have to have a high conflict conversation with you as your manager, the more official I make it sound, the harder I make it for you to feel safe to argue back with me. We use formality to gaslight a little bit in these high conflict situations.
So ChatGPT does that because people do that. In a situation where you’re using AI to write something with any generic AI tool that wasn’t designed for the particular scenario at hand, you will end up with these lowest common denominator behaviors.
What do you want to research next?
I had this conversation a couple of months ago with a CHRO that’s ricocheting around my brain. [This was someone] lamenting the state of management capability in their organization. And she was like, it just is not getting better.
I asked her, ‘Okay, let’s say in your organization, you have a manager who’s really hitting all their deliverables for their team. Everything’s on time. The quality is great. But they just don’t write performance reviews ever. They just opt out of the process. They don’t give their team feedback. Does that person get promoted or do they get fired?’
She was very confused by the question. She was like: If they hit all their deliverables, they obviously get promoted. And I was like, there’s your problem. People are busy. They’re going to do the thing that actually gets them paid. So one of the things I’ve become really interested in over the last year is the relationship between the accountabilities at the top level and feedback quality and employee retention. If it’s not something that you really promote, hire or fire over, then there’s not actually real accountability. It’s a nice-to-have.
FACTS + COMMENT
Senior contributor Jack Kelly recently wrote about how professionals with AI skills are in demand among companies, pointing to recent research from Microsoft and LinkedIn which finds that the majority of business leaders (66%) will not consider hiring a candidate who does not possess AI skills. The report also points to the following data, Kelly reports:
323%: The increase in hiring for technical AI talent over the past eight years, according to the Microsoft and LinkedIn report
71%: The percentage of executives who say they prefer to hire a candidate with AI skills, even if the person has less overall experience than a candidate who lacks AI aptitude
“Learning basic AI skills—such as prompt engineering, machine learning or data literacy—is the best insurance to shortcut your competitiveness against people who might have more experience,” Aneesh Raman, the chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn, told CNBC Make It.
STRATEGIES + ADVICE
Leadership in a new work environment takes a different set of skills. Here’s how to lead in a hybrid world.
Workplace ‘friction’ is frustrating—but fixable. Stanford professor Bob Sutton shares how.
Here’s how employers can support the mental health of working mothers.
VIDEO
ForbesDawn Staley Asserted Her Value - And Has Found Her Purpose As Coach
QUIZ
Amid “brat summer” and Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign’s use of memes, Gen Z (or even Gen Alpha) slang is having an impact in the workplace. Test your jargon knowledge: Why might the phrase “no cap” be used in the workplace?
- To describe someone without skills, abilities or competencies
- To emphasize transparency, honesty or sincerity
- To refer to a lack of funding or revenue
- To describe an angry person
Check out if you got the right answer here.
